The Development of Children's Teleo-Functional Bias

随着生物技术和医学研究与这个国家的经济和身体健康越来越相关，精心构思和精心设计的科学课程的重要性从未如此之大。在这种背景下，本项目关注的是思维模式的性质--以及对这种思维模式的适当教学反应，这种思维模式一方面是科学素养发展的先决条件，但另一方面可能对生物过程的真正科学理解的阐述产生深刻的危害。它是生命科学素养的基础，因为它区分了西方受过教育的成年人对生物与非生物自然现象的概念：虽然成年人认为鼻孔等实体是“为”特定功能而存在的（例如，呼吸），他们倾向于将诸如洞穴的实体视为无意识的，即使它们执行许多活动（例如，产生石笋）。然而，尽管他们的核心，以绘制一个基本的科学区别，大多数非专家的具体想法的功能是一个障碍，生物学的理解。这是因为他们的动机是错误的观点，认为自然选择是一个类似于故意设计的目标导向过程，而不是一个盲目的机制。因此，了解这种科学误解的起源，并尽早设计有效的课程材料来应对它，对于促进终身生物学素养和学习至关重要。为此，本研究的目标是实证地探索幼儿进入科学学校教育的形成期时目的功能直觉的性质，并利用这一经验基础作为创新的基础，探索性的教育干预，教5至8岁的儿童自然选择。之所以强调这一点，是因为最近的几项调查结果表明需要开展这类工作。首先，目前的研究表明，直到进入小学，儿童似乎都认为各种生物和非生物实体--时钟、狮子、池塘、山脉、云及其属性--存在是有目的的（DiYanni Kelemen，2005 a; Kelemen，1999 ab，2003;但见Keil，1992）。因此，与成年人不同，学龄前儿童和小学儿童似乎无法沿着目的功能线区分有生命的自然现象和无生命的自然现象。其次，研究还表明，幼儿的目的为基础的归因是由直觉，自然现象是有意设计的产品（皮亚杰，1929年;埃文斯，2000年a，2001年;凯莱门，2004年）。因此，幼儿已经表现出被认为是科学理解生物学的持续障碍的推理模式的特征。在探索儿童拥有这种直觉以及对这些想法的潜在指导反应的可能原因时，这项研究旨在作为更大研究计划的第一步，与幼儿教育工作者合作，和一个由跨学科研究人员组成的专家国际咨询小组，旨在将认知发展研究的方法和见解直接应用于创新和经验丰富的早期科学教学的设计。

As biotechnology and medical research become ever more relevant to this nation's economic and physical well being, the importance of well conceived and carefully designed scientific curricula has never been greater. In that context, this project concerns the nature of - and appropriate pedagogical response to - a pattern of thought that is, on the one hand, prerequisite to the development of scientific literacy but that, on the other hand, can be profoundly deleterious to the elaboration of a true scientific understanding of biological processes.Teleo-functional reasoning explains entities and events in terms of the purposes that they serve. It is foundational to literacy in the life sciences because it distinguishes western schooled adults' conceptions of biological versus non-biological natural phenomena: While adults view entities such as nostrils as existing "for" particular functions (e.g., breathing), they tend to view entities such as caves as purposeless even though they perform many activities (e.g., producing stalagmites). However, despite their centrality to drawing a basic scientific distinction, most non-experts' specific ideas about function are an obstacle to biological understanding. This is because they are motivated by a mistaken view of natural selection as a goal-directed process akin to intentional design rather than as a blind mechanism. Understanding the origins of this scientific misconstrual, and designing effective curricular materials to counter it as early as possible, is therefore crucial to the promotion of lifelong literacy and learning in biology.To that end, the goal of this research is to empirically explore the nature of young children's teleo-functional intuitions as they enter the formative years of their scientific schooling, and to use this empirical foundation as the basis for an innovative, exploratory educational intervention to teach 5- to 8-year-old children natural selection. This emphasis occurs in response to several recent findings indicating the need for such work. First, current studies suggest that until well into elementary school, children appear to construe all kinds of living and non-living entities - clocks, lions, ponds, mountains, clouds and their properties - as existing for a purpose (DiYanni & Kelemen, 2005a; Kelemen, 1999ab, 2003; but see Keil, 1992). In consequence, unlike adults, pre- and elementary school children do not seem to differentiate living from non-living natural phenomena along teleo-functional lines. Second, research also suggests that young children's purpose-based attributions are motivated by intuitions that natural phenomena are products of intentional design (Piaget, 1929; Evans, 2000a, 2001; Kelemen, 2004). As a result, young children therefore already show the hallmarks of reasoning patterns recognized as persistent impediments to a scientific understanding of biology.In exploring possible reasons why children possess such intuitions plus potential instructional responses to these ideas, this research is intended as the initial step in a larger research program that, in partnership with early childhood educators, and an expert international advisory panel of inter-disciplinary researchers, seeks to directly apply methods and insights from cognitive developmental research to the design of innovative and empirically informed early scientific instruction.