Implicit associations of teleology and essentialism concepts with genetics concepts among secondary school students

In this article, we present the development and validation of an implicit association test for measuring secondary school students’ associations between genetics concepts and teleology concepts on the one hand, and between genetics concepts and essentialism concepts on the other hand. In total, 169 students from 16 school classes took part in the study, from January 2018 to May 2018. We investigated the strength of the aforementioned associations and the influence of various covariates such as gender, age, school class, or previous learning of biology on the association of teleology or essentialism concepts with genetics concepts through an analysis of covariance and a multi-level analysis. We found moderate associations between genetics and teleology concepts, as well as between genetics and essentialism concepts. These results might reflect a tendency of students of different ages and with various backgrounds to think about genes in terms of goals (teleology) and stability (essentialism), which should be investigated further in future research.