Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.