Young children’s impressionable use of teleology: the influence of question wording and questioned topic on teleological explanations for natural phenomena

ABSTRACT

There is a significant body of research on children’s preconceptions concerning scientific concepts and the impact this has upon their science education. One active issue concerns the extent to which young children’s explanations for the existence of natural kinds rely on a teleological rationale: for example, rain is for watering the grass, or tigers’ stripes are for camouflage. It has been argued that this teleological tendency hampers children’s ability to learn about causality in the natural world. This paper investigates two factors (question wording and topic) which it is argued have led to a misestimation of children’s teleological tendencies within the area natural phenomena: i.e. those that are time-constrained, natural events or process such as snow, clouds or night. Sixty-six (5–8 years old) children took part in a repeated-measures experiment, answering both open and leading questions across 10 topics of natural phenomena. The findings indicate that children’s teleological reasoning may have been overestimated as open-question forms significantly reduced their tendency to answer teleologically. Moreover, the concept of teleology is more nuanced than often suggested. Consequently, young children may be more able to learn about causal explanations for the existence of natural phenomena than the literature implies.

KEYWORDS:

• Teleology
• teleological explanation
• natural phenomena
• young children

Acknowledgements

This paper is a revised and extended version of a short paper published in the proceedings of the International Conference of Learning Sciences 2016 (Halls, Ainsworth, & Oliver, 2016). The conference paper only reported preliminary results pertaining to question wording.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jonathan Grant Halls http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0945-5891

Shaaron Elizabeth Ainsworth http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9453-7196

Mary Collette Oliver http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4177-0920

Notes

1. Natural objects included caves, icebergs, mountains, rocks, sand, soil, stars, the moon and the sun. Natural phenomena included darkness, day, light, night, rain, rainbows, snow, storms, waterfalls, waves and wind.

2. Due to data coded as other and the removal of scientific responses, Cochran’s Q-test was not appropriate due to loss of sample size. However, each topic could be explored independently.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number 1366484].