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 …

Young children are adept at several types of scientific reasoning, yet older children and
adults have difficulty mastering formal scientific ideas and practices. Why do “little scientists” …

Misconceptions about adaptation by natural selection are widespread among adults and
likely stem, in part, from cognitive biases and intuitive theories observable in early …

In learning about the world, we often form inferences on the basis of sparse data. Despite
this challenge, children are prolific learners. Very young children form, test, and rationally …

Both explanation and exploration can foster causal learning, yet the mechanisms underlying
these effects are largely unknown, especially in early childhood. In this article, I provide an …

This chapter focuses on the foundational role that intuitive reasoning, such as essentialist
and teleological reasoning, and intuitive language forms, such as generics, might play in the …

When students learn scientific theories that conflict with their earlier, naïve theories, what
happens to the earlier theories? Are they overwritten or merely suppressed? We …

We investigated whether children preferentially select informative actions and make
accurate inferences from the outcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task …

This study examines first graders' epistemic reasoning, in tacit “practical epistemologies”
reflected in thinking about an investigation of their own design. I analyzed children's …

It might seem contradictory to believe that humans were created in their present form at one
time within the past 10,000 years and at the same time believe that humans developed over …