In two studies, 6-12-year-old children (Study 1: N = 58; Study 2: N = 38) and adults (Study 2: N = 22) rank ordered intentional, teleological and essentialist explanations for different behaviours of living-kind groups representing a range of biological kinds from plants to humans. Overall, humans elicited more intentional explanations, insects and plants elicited more essentialist explanations, and intermediate taxa, such as ungulates, elicited more teleological explanations. Children made fewer fine-grained taxonomic distinctions than adults, and the youngest children tended to reject essentialism. The 6-7-year-old children preferred to reason about living-kind behaviours from an intentional and teleological perspective; only towards the end of the elementary school years did children seem to incorporate a biological essentialism. Neither adults nor children were exclusively bound to a particular mode of explanation, but exercised 'causal flexibility' across different behavioural contexts.As the coach herds his little league team onto the bus, afternoon shoppers flock to the mall for a sale. Meanwhile, a fearless youngster hangs like a monkey from the jungle gym in the playground. Each of these fairly common events seems simple to imagine, although none of them is true in a literal sense. Kahn (1997) argues that the ease with which we are able to detect commonalities among humans and other animals reflects a natural human tendency to affiliate with nature, the biophilia hypothesis. Given adults' ability to use their biological knowledge to draw systematic analogies between the behaviour of humans and other animals, some variant of this capacity is likely to be a feature in children's thinking as well. In two studies, we focus on the development of biological knowledge during the elementary school years and into adulthood. Specifically, we investigate whether, during this period, developmental change and/ or stability characterize the use of three causal explanations considered to be central to an understanding of the animate world: intention, teleology, and essentialism. In

The development of concepts of individual death and species extinction were examined in two studies. Sixty-eight, 4-to 9-year-old children and their parents participated in Study 1. Although preschoolers had some understanding of the concept of death, the ability to explain death and extinction improved over the school-age years. However, all age groups were reluctant to accept that extinction may be inevitable for all species, despite the ease with which they accepted death as inevitable for all living beings. This resistance was especially strong in the case of human extinction. Study 2 extended these findings with three groups of adults possessing different degrees of biological expertise. Unlike medical students and lay-adults, evolutionary biologists endorsed the inevitability of extinction and generalized this belief to humans. The results suggest that for the lay-public, death and extinction concepts elicit existential concerns and that they are embedded in potentially conflicting intuitive theories: metaphysics and biology.

In the United States, lay-adults with a range of educational backgrounds often conceptualize species change within a non-Darwinian adaptationist framework, or reject such ideas altogether, opting instead for creationist accounts in which species are viewed as immutable. In this study, such findings were investigated further by examining the relationship between religious belief, scientific expertise, and ecological reasoning in 132 college-educated adults from 6 religious backgrounds in a Midwestern city. Fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist religious beliefs were differentially related to concepts of evolution, adaptation, and extinction. Biological expertise (r = .28) and creationism (r = −.46) were significantly and differentially related to the endorsement of the Darwinian concept of common descent. Yet, creationists were more likely to reject macroevolutionary than microevolutionary concepts. Overall, the greater the taxonomic distance between species, the less likely were participants to agree that species-pairs had common ancestors. It is argued that lay adults from contemporary industrialized societies adopt a view of evolution in which species adapt to novel environments, but remain the same "kind" despite changes. Therefore, extinction is considered unlikely and the relations between micro-and macroevolution misconstrued. Lay-adults' species concepts appear to be an amalgam of a common-sense understanding of species and of evolutionary ideas, modified but not transformed by religious and scientific beliefs. Finally, it is argued that the development of scientific expertise does not involve the radical transformation of ingrained worldviews. Rather, scientists select specializations that are compatible with their existing philosophies, then consciously apply the constructs of their disciplines in order to transcend their common-sense folk beliefs.

In recent years, national policy experts have questioned the overall quality of educational research, and they have suggested that researchers strengthen their scientific methods by maximizing the use of experimental designs. To promote more rigorous methodology, we discuss several new and often-overlooked opportunities for incorporating experimentation into the scholarship of teaching and learning in psychology. Although experiments can be difficult to conduct in educational settings, our methodological suggestions are particularly well-suited for relatively small-scale studies, like those typically published in Teaching of Psychology.