Common-sense intuitions can be useful guides in everyday life and problem solving. However, they can also impede formal science learning and provide the basis for robust scientific misconceptions. Addressing such misconceptions has generally been viewed as the province of secondary schooling. However, in this article, I argue that for a set of foundational but highly counterintuitive ideas (e.g., evolution by natural selection), coherent causal-explanatory instruction-instruction that emphasizes the multifaceted mechanisms underpinning natural phenomena-should be initiated much sooner, in early elementary school. This proposal is motivated by various findings from research in the cognitive, developmental, and learning sciences. For example, it has been shown that explanatory biases that render students susceptible to intuitively based scientific misconceptions emerge early in development. Furthermore, findings also reveal that once developed, such misconceptions are not revised and replaced by subsequently learned scientific theories but competitively coexist alongside them. Taken together, this research, along with studies revealing the viability of early coherent explanation-based instruction on counterintuitive theories, have significant implications for the timing, structure, and scope of early science education.

中文翻译：

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机制的魔力：基于解释的幼儿期反直觉概念教学。

常识直觉可以在日常生活和解决问题中提供有用的指导。但是，它们也会阻碍形式科学的学习，并为扎实的科学误解提供基础。解决这种误解通常被视为中学教育的省。但是，在本文中，我认为，对于一系列基础但高度违反直觉的观念（例如，自然选择的进化），应强调在自然现象中建立起强调自然现象的多方面机制的连贯的因果解释性指令，这一点应该早得多地提出。早期的小学。这项提议的动机是来自认知，发展和学习科学领域的各种研究结果。例如，研究表明，使学生容易受到基于直觉的科学误解的解释性偏见在发展的早期就出现了。此外，研究结果还表明，一旦产生了这样的误解，这些误解就不会被修正并被后来学到的科学理论所取代，而是与它们并存地竞争地共存。总之，这项研究以及揭示早期基于连贯解释的反直觉理论教学的可行性的研究，对早期科学教育的时机，结构和范围具有重要意义。