Is book reading always best? Children learn and transfer complex scientific explanations from books or animations

Table 2 Preconception coding scheme with description and examples

Preconception type	Description	Examples
Developmental	The intuition that an individual member of a species will develop a given, generally beneficial, trait as it grows older	([The change] happened because) the shorter legs grew up/got older
Transformation	The intuition that one member/generation of a species is able to spontaneously acquire new generally beneficial traits	([The change] happened because) the shorter legs got longer / got stretchier (no clear mechanism given)
Explicitly Teleological	The intuition that members of a given species develop a trait in response to a need for that trait or because traits develop in order to serve a purpose	The wilkies needed longer legs so they got them. \| The wilkies got longer legs so they could live. \| The wilkies got longer legs because longer legs helped them get food
Other	Any other preconceptions	That’s the way they were created \| The one with the longer legs (lived longer) because he’s bigger

Note that given the structure of the assessments, developmental and transformation preconceptions are potentially tacitly teleological even when lacking standard linguistic indicators of teleological explanation (e.g., “so that”, “in order to”). Thus, we distinguish them from “explicitly” teleological explanations (see Brown et al. 2020 for discussion of this issue)

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