Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adults with extensive science education exhibit cognitiveconflict when reasoning about counterintuitive scientificideas, such as whether clouds have weight or whether bacterianeed nutrients. Here, we investigated whether elementary-school-aged children show the same conflict and whether thatconflict can be reduced by targeted instruction. Seventy-eight5- to 12-year-olds verified, as quickly as possible, statementsabout life and matter before and after a tutorial on thescientific properties of life or matter. Half the statements wereconsistent with intuitive theories of the domain (e.g., “frogsreproduce”) and half were inconsistent (e.g., “cactusesreproduce”). Participants verified the latter less accurately andmore slowly than the former, both before instruction andafter. Instruction increased the accuracy of participants’verifications for counterintuitive statements within thedomain of instruction but not their speed. These resultsindicate that children experience conflict between scientificand intuitive conceptions of a domain in the earliest stages ofacquiring scientific knowledge but can learn to resolve thatconflict in favor of scientific conceptions.