Reframing research on intuitive science knowledge

Education research has devoted significant effort to understanding the intuitive knowledge students bring to bear in reasoning about formal science. In addition to documenting the specific content of students' conceptions in particular domains, some researchers attempt to make more general claims, both within and across domains, about the nature of intuitive knowledge. These attempts involve an implicit assumption that the character and function of all intuitive knowledge is the same - that there is a single kind of thing called "intuitive science knowledge" that can be singularly characterized. The purpose of this work is to call that assumption into question, and we present examples to highlight our concerns. We propose a theoretical framework that provides a way to more carefully frame our research on intuitive science knowledge and demonstrate how it can be used to bring additional clarity to current discussions in the literature.