Most of the college students that NSF and I talked to had "learned science" - as isolated cases, stories that would be retrieved to deal with a similar situation, not as a system of inter related arguments about what we think we know and how well we think we know it.
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Claude Levi-Strauss and Seymour Papert have called this incremental isolated "natural" learning "bricolage" - which means making something by "tinkering around." This is one of the reasons that engineering predates science by thousands of years; some constructions can be accomplished gradually by trial and error without needing any grand explanations for why things work.
— Powerful Ideas Need Love Too! - Alan Kay