Why Teach How Things Work? Tracking the Evolution of Children's Intuitions About Complexity

Mechanistic information can be characterized as the interacting causal components underlying a phenomenon in short, how something works. Children and adults are notoriously poor at learning, remembering, and applying mechanistic information, so it comes as no surprise that the wisdom of teaching mechanism has come under increasing scrutiny in science education. However, while a rich memory for mechanistic details may be out of the average student’s grasp, we argue that exposure to mechanism does not leave students empty-handed. Instead, it refines their intuitions about science and the world in significant ways. For the current study, we focused on one kind of intuition in particular: beliefs about causal complexity. Children ages 611 rated the complexity of a heart and a lock and were then given either mechanistic or non-mechanistic information about them. Afterwards, they were asked if their intuitions about complexity had changed and if so by how much. Three weeks later, children were asked again about their intuitions about complexity. Crucially, children who were given mechanistic information demonstrated a significantly greater shift in their assessments of complexity for both the heart and door lock compared to their counterparts who were given non-mechanistic information. This contradicts the notion that mechanism provides learners with few benefits while also demonstrating how mechanism can be a powerful force in shaping children’s intuitions.