Developmental Disconnects: Adults and Teachers Deprioritize Mechanistic Content when Introducing Young Children to STEM

How do adults consider explaining science to young children? We examined adult prioritization of different kinds of explanatory science content when teaching young children both in and outside of the classroom. Across five studies, we predicted and found that adults and K-12 teachers deprioritized mechanistic content relative to comparatively superficial content (e.g., labels and functional explanations) when introducing areas of science to young school age children. Beyond perceiving mechanistic explanations to be relatively infrequent in elementary school science curricula, adults appear to perceive mechanistic content as excessively challenging for students, reporting that in-depth, mechanistic content is less important for early elementary school children to learn compared to broader, superficial content. The same misperceptions were found among experienced teachers and lay adults, suggesting a general intuition that science learning should start with relatively superficial content before describing causal relations that produce a scientific phenomenon. These findings contradict widely adopted educational standards emphasizing the importance of in-depth content such as mechanistic explanations. Such in-depth, mechanistic content supports children’s scientific engagement, combats potential misconceptions, and bolsters future learning. Despite this, lay adults and experienced teachers support teaching science to young children in ways that do not fit with children’s learning abilities and interests.