SGER: Preliminary Investigations of the Factors Impacting the Acquisition of Evolutionary Concepts

这是一个小的探索性研究拨款(SGER)提案，旨在研究儿童对进化的理解。该提案的主要目标是开展必要的探索性研究，以帮助阐明一个发展框架，以了解儿童早期概念发展与其获得进化概念之间的关系。这项工作背后的假设是，人们很难理解某些进化概念，因为这些概念可能与人们关于适应和选择的直觉概念和信念相冲突。进化论概念意味着所有物种在某种意义上都是相关的。这挑战了人们的直觉偏见，即认为物种在性质上是不同的。研究人员建议进行三项探索性研究。这些研究将在3-4岁、5-7岁、8-9岁、10-12岁的年龄组和非专业成年人中进行。通过一系列开放式和封闭式问题，研究人员将探索儿童对不同物种的动物是如何出现在地球上的理解，以及它们的原因在多大程度上与智能设计论、进化论和自发生成论等解释相一致。这些研究还将探索儿童推理的其他方面，例如他们倾向于认为物种具有固定的本质，以确定这种推理在支持或限制儿童对进化的理解方面可能起到什么作用。这项创新且有智力风险的工作有望在当前认知理论的基础上开始奠定基础，在此基础上可以建立一种新的进化论教学方法。

This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) proposal examining children's acquisition of an understanding of evolution. The main goal of the proposal is to carry out the exploratory studies necessary to help articulate a developmental framework for understanding the relationship between children's early conceptual development and their acquisition of evolutionary concepts. The hypothesis underlying this work is that people have difficulty grasping certain evolutionary concepts because these concepts may conflict with people's intuitive concepts and beliefs about adaptation and selection. Evolutionary concepts imply the notion that all species are, in a sense, related. This challenges what may be an intuitive bias in people to think about species as being qualitatively distinct. The investigators propose to conduct three exploratory studies. The studies will be conducted on participants in age-groups of 3-4 years, 5-7 years, 8-9 years, 10-12 years, and lay adults. Using a series of open-ended as well as closed-ended questions, the investigators will explore children's understandings of, for example, how animals of different species appeared on Earth and the extent to which their reasons are in accord with such explanations as Intelligent-Design, Evolutionist, and Spontaneous-Generationist. The studies will also probe other aspects of children's reasoning, such as their tendency to think of species as having a fixed essence, in order to determine what role such reasoning might have in supporting or constraining children's understanding of evolution. This innovative and intellectually risky work promises to begin to lay the groundwork, based on current cognitive theory, upon which a novel approach to the teaching of evolution could be built.