Biologists, lay adults, and children alike value causal explanations of how biological entities work. Despite this, elementary school science education has historically lacked mechanistic content. In line with recent science education standards, we investigated the effects of mechanistic learning goals on understanding of an in-depth lesson about how the heart works. Children ages 6 to 11 who were given mechanistic learning goals performed better on knowledge assessments of the heart lesson and enjoyed their learning goal more than children who were given a relatively superficial learning goal—to focus on labels. Thus, learning goals orienting children towards mechanistic content during lessons enhance science learning and enjoyment.

Elementary schools provide students with their first encounters with formal science, creating both foundations for students’ knowledge of science content, and impressions of what it means to learn science. Here, we examined adult, including K-12 teachers’, intuitions regarding different types of content relevant to elementary school science, namely, labels, function, and mechanism. We focused primarily on perceptions of mechanistic explanations—causal explanations that explain how something works. This focus stems from children’s curiosity and aptitude for mechanism. Across four studies we predicted, and found, that participants deprioritize mechanistic explanations relative to more superficial explanation types: labels and function. This intuition, which appears to be reflected in formal science curricula, misestimates children’s abilities and attitudes towards mechanistic information.

Students enter educational settings with complex and well-established intuitive conceptual understandings of theworld, which have important educational consequences. In biology, intuitive thinking can be characterized in terms of cogni-tive construals (anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, Coley & Tanner, 2015). We examined relations betweenintuitive thinking and biological misconceptions, and how formal biology education might influence such relations. 137 bi-ology and non-science majors completed measures of anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, and indicatedagreement/disagreement with common misconceptions and explained their responses. Teleological thinking (but not anthro-pocentric or essentialist thinking) predicted teleological misconceptions. Anthropocentric and teleological thinking (but notessentialist thinking) predicted anthropocentric misconceptions. Agreement with essentialist misconceptions was unrelated tointuitive thinking. Similar patterns for non-majors and majors suggests formal biology education may have little influence onrelations between intuitive reasoning and misconceptions. These findings demonstrate a clear impact of intuitive thinking onlearning biology at the university level.