The Development of Children's Teleo-Functional Bias

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

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.