How Intuitive Thinking Impacts Formal Science Education

Colloquium
John D Coley,  Nicole Betz,  Emily Dahlgaard Thor,  Michal Fux,  Lauren Swiney,  Sarah Pickett,  Kimberly Tanner,  Kristin De Nesnera  

It is increasingly clear that students enter educational settings with complex and well-established conceptual understandings of the world around them. These intuitive understandings can have important educational consequences; new knowledge does not merely replace existing conceptions, but interacts with them in complex and unexpected ways. The goal of this colloquium is to communicate findings from a set of related projects that integrate research in cognitive science and science education to illuminate how intuitive thinking facilitates and/or impedes the acquisition of formal scientific understanding. We will present evidence that misconceptions common among students may not stem solely from the complexity or opacity of the scientific concepts themselves, but also from the fact that concepts may clash with informal, intuitive, and deeply held ways of understanding the world. We will also argue that intuitive thinking can scaffold learning of formal science concepts. The colloquium will include the following talks: Relations Between Intuitive Thinking and Misconceptions in University Biology Students; Intuitive Thinking Impacts Understanding of Global Climate Change; Investigating the Influence of an Intuitive Thinking Intervention on Misconceptions about Antibiotic Resistance; Intuitive Thinking Scaffolds Deeper Understanding of Health Concepts in High School Students; Cognitive Constraints Shape Risk Perception of Synthetic Biology. Discussion will center around implications of these findings for teaching and learning in STEM classrooms at all levels. By elucidating relations between intuitive thought and formal science learning, we hope to establish a new theoretical framework for understanding the acquisition of expertise in the sciences, thereby changing the way science is taught.