Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What type of information best supports learning? In educational settings, instructional information may describe patterns of error and provide corrections, or explain the mechanisms that generate those errors. This distinction may be especially consequential in scientific domains where misconceptions are common. We tested whether mechanistic explanations of why misconceptions arise support adults' learning of a counterintuitive scientific idea beyond descriptive error correction. U.S. elementary school teachers (N = 127) were assigned to a Control, Description, or Mechanistic explanation condition in a professional development intervention on natural selection, where they heard different accounts of common student misconceptions. Teachers' generalized learning of natural selection was assessed using near and far transfer measures. Near generalization improved across all conditions, but far generalization improved only in the Mechanistic condition, suggesting that fostering a deeper conceptual framework for understanding misconceptions supports broader, more flexible learning of counterintuitive conceptual content than descriptive correction.