Skip to main content

Table 7 Percentage of participants who expressed explicitly teleological and ambiguous misconceptions

From: Teaching natural selection in early elementary classrooms: can a storybook intervention reduce teleological misunderstandings?

Type of preconceptions

Pretest

Posttest

Any form of preconception

85%

23%

Ambiguous preconception

58%

16%

Explicit TE

28%

7%

 Basic TE

5%

2%

 Elaborated TE

23%

5%

  1. Note: Percentages show the percentage of all participants (N = 220) who expressed a particular form of misconception. The two forms of teleological reasoning (basic and elaborated) are mutually exclusive. The numbers in this table do not sum to the figures in Table 6 because children are only counted in one group (e.g., a child with both basic teleology and effort would be counted in the elaborated TE group and not in the basic TE group)