Demonstrating Contingency between Intuitive Biological Reasoning and Perpetual Biological Misconceptions across Levels of Academic Expertise

We hypothesized that many persistent misconceptions in Biology education may have origins in intuitive ways of reasoning, termed cognitive construals (teleological, essentialist, and anthropic thinking). We, indeed, found that endorsement of a biological misconception was significantly correlated with the production of a specific construal, across levels of expertise.