Categories in conflict: Combating the application of an intuitive conception of inheritance with category construction

Abstract

The idea that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be inherited by offspring and result in evolution is a substantial impediment to student understanding of evolution. In the current study, we performed a preliminary examination of how acquiring physical changes in a question prompt may differentially cue intuitive and scientific justifications of inheritance and evolution and how this varies based on how student learned the concept. Middle school students in a suburban northeastern district (N = 314) either learned about evolutionary change with a category construction task (with different levels of feedback support) or completed a worksheet. Three days later students responded to two free response scenarios (one where a physical change is acquired). Responses were coded based on student justifications for either science accuracy or intuitive nature. Specific reasons were coded by justification type with high inter‐rater agreement (k > 0.93). Results showed that students were more likely to apply intuitive reasoning when a physical change was acquired (50%) than if the change was behavioral in nature (16%). Additionally, students who completed the category construction task provided significantly more scientifically accurate justifications about inheritance (M = 1.12) than control students (M = 0.47), and significantly less intuitive justifications (M = 0.67) than control (M = 1.13). Finally, category construction produced the most scientific reasoning when feedback was provided. Taken together, these results suggest that intuitive reasoning is differentially applied based on physical organismal changes, intuitive reasoning is less frequent when learning via category construction, and the category construction task is more effective for this population with the inclusion of feedback.

Sorting out the problem of inert knowledge: Category construction to promote spontaneous transfer.

“…We have begun testing category construction as an instructional technique for target principles from the curriculum in 7th grade science classrooms. This has led to promising results for transfer of knowledge relative to a worksheet control group (Honke et al, 2015;Kurtz et al, in preparation;Premo, Cavagnetto, Honke, & Kurtz, 2018). The best results were obtained with a sort task following up a lesson and using labeled sort groups with a head start of one sorted example.…”

Promoting Complex Problem Solving by Introducing Schema-Governed Categories of Key Causal Models

“…Different to the card sorting task employed by Kurtz and Honke [ 55 ], we predefined the categories and provided participants with the causal model category labels. We decided on that procedure, because a previous study using a category construction task as an instructional method yielded the best results for a subsequent transfer task if the category construction task was administered as a summary at the end of the lesson (as we did) and provided participants with the category labels (as we did) [ 82 ].…”

Romantic Transfer from Thermodynamic Theories to Personal Theories of Social Control: A Randomised Controlled Experiment

“…It borrows the intricacy, universality, and profundity of the scientific establishment to inspire life wisdom; however, it does not follow a rigorous scientific process to falsify personal theories. Multiple studies have explored the phenomenon of 'coexistence' among science learners-their ability to hold self-developed imprecise intuitions and, at the same time, precise understanding of scientific concepts, whereas the two can be selectively activated depending on the context [11][12][13][14].…”