8' Scientific Thinking

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8. Scientific Thinking

• Outline
• Childrens scientific knowledge
• 3 areas
• Physics
• Biology
• (Psychology)
• Scientific thinking
• Development of reasoning and theories
• Domain specific or domain general?
• Learning Outcomes

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Scientific knowledge

• Not just accumulation of facts, but ways of
  thinking
• E.g. Primary school children know world is round,
  but their thinking reflects the idea that world
  is flat (Nussbaum and Novack, 1976 Nussbaum,
  1985)

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Scientific knowledge

• Understanding mediated by
• 1) logical aspects of a concept
• 2) situations that give meaning to a concept
• 3) the way a problem is represented
• But everyday experiences often conflict with
  learned scientific concepts
• 1) making distinctions that are not made in
  everyday life
• 2) reasoning about non-perceptible aspects of the
  physical world

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Infants Young Children

• Surprisingly knowledgeable
• 4/5 months use contiguity to infer that events
  are related
• Expect collision to make object move
• Dont expect object to move without force
  (Leslie, 1982)
• 4-6 months understand principles of gravity
• Falling object will fall even if cant see it
  (Spelke, 1991)
• 3-4 years understand causation
• Causes occur before effects (Bullock Gelman,
  1979)

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Older children

• Surprisingly unknowledgeable
• 11 yr olds when we see an object, energy or rays
  come out of our eyes (Winer Cottrell, 1991)
• Children/college students car doors move at same
  speed on oval track (Levin et al., 1990)
• 8 yr olds predict trajectory of ball from curved
  tube incorrectly (Kaiser et al., 1986)
• 11 yr olds object dropped from moving vehicle
  falls straight (Kaiser et al., 1985)

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Understanding Physics

• Time Speed
• Trains (Piaget,1946)
• Trajectories
• C-Shaped tube (Kaiser et al., 1986)
• Falling Objects (McCloskey et al., 2000
  McCloskey et al. 1980)
• Force Weight
• Force table (Pauen, 1996)

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Trajectories
(Kaiser et al., 2000)
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Force table
(Pauen Wilkening, 1997)
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Understanding Biology

• Animacy
• 3yrs start to distinguish between
  animate/inanimate
• Bodies
• Based on psychology? (Carey, 1985)
• Health illness (Bibace Walsh, 1981)
• 4 yrs illness from contagion
• 7 yrs physical contact
• 11 yrs sophisticated understanding
• Death

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Understanding Biology

• Genetics
• Inheritance of acquired characteristics
• Belief can survive until adulthood
• Tailless mice (Clough Driver ,1991)
• Correct explanation
• 12 yr olds 10
• 14 yr olds 17
• 16 yr olds 43
• Performance on athletic ability and rough skin
  on gardeners hands worse!
• Role of the father in family resemblance

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Child as Scientist

• Inhelder Piaget (1958)
• Understanding of scientific methods develops in
  adolescence as part of formal operational stage
• Predicts
• 1) children should be able to discover scientific
  concepts on their own
• 2) children should be able to generalise across
  contexts
• Support
• Correlation between success in science and
  reasoning ability (Piburn, 1990)
• Against
• conditional reasoning research

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Conceptual change

• Piaget
• conflict ? disequilibrium ? cognitive change
• Continuum of developmental change (Carey, 1991)
• Incremental change
• Start with basic assumptions
• Add/modify information
• Changing concepts
• To
• Strong restructuring
• Old theory incompatible with new
• Change in scientific thinking

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Children have naïve theories

• Physics, Biology, Psychology
• Domain specific?
• but are they thinking scientifically?
• Scientific thought
• Theories and evidence
• Does evidence support/refute theory?
• Theory used to organise and interpret evidence
• Do children / lay adults / scientists go through
  the same process?
• Metaphor misleading (Kuhn, 1989)

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Theories and evidence

• 3 problems with children and lay adults
• Theory bound
• Ignore discrepant evidence
• Selective, distortive attention to evidence which
  doesnt fit
• Adjust evidence to fit with theory
• Data bound
• Focus on most recent results when constructing
  theory
• They need theories
• Cant look at data without theory

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Scientific Reasoning - Biology

• Food type colds (Kuhn, 1988)
• 11-14 yr olds
• Covariation or non-covariation between eating
  different types of food and susceptibility to
  colds
• Poor performance
• Ignored evidence
• Failed to see that new theory contradicts old one
• Before 11/12 little insight into hypothesis
  testing

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(Kuhn et al., 1988 / Goswami 1998)
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Scientific Reasoning - Physics

• Microworld experiment (Schauble, 1990)
• 10/11yr olds
• Effects of 5 variables on speed of racing cars
• Engine
• Wheels
• Muffler
• Tailfins
• Colour
• Varied several factors at a time
• Drew conclusions inconsistent with results

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Explanation of poor performance

• 2 skills for scientific reasoning
• Meaning of evidence evaluation of evidence
• Relation between theory and evidence
• Metacognitive abilities (Kuhn, 1989)
• Encode/represent evidence theory separately
• Treat theory as independent object of thought
• Be open to falsity of theory
• Requires operations and mental operations
• Not available until formal operations stage

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Earlier abilities

• Theory of Mind false belief tasks
• 4/5 yr olds can reason about evidence and
  hypothesis
• Mouse size task (Sodian et al., 1991)
• 6/7 yr olds can choose appropriate test for the
  hypothesis
• Faked evidence task (Ruffman et al, 1993)
• 5 yr olds understand relationship between
  hypothesis and evidence

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Domain-specific or domain-general?

• Domain-specific
• Entities and explanations go together (Carey
  Spelke, 1994)
• People psychological explanations
• Inanimate objects physical explanations
• Plants/animals biological explanations
• e.g. Voluntary vs reactionary movement (Smith,
  1978)
• 4 yr olds all movement is intentional
• 5 yr olds distinguish reflex from intention

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Domain-specific or domain-general?

• Humans physicsbiologypsychology
• Explanations of human behaviour in 3/4 yr olds
  (Wellman et al., 2000)
• 4 types of story
• intended, mistake, biological, physical
• 3 types of explanation
• Psychological, biological, physical
• Causal reasoning across 3 domains interchangeable
  and flexible

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Domain-specific or domain-general?

• Evidence from autism
• Impaired intuitive psychology
• Intact (advanced?) intuitive physics
• Limited intuitive biology? (Gopnik, 2001)
• Or intact intuitive biology? (Binnie Williams,
  2000)

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Learning Outcomes Reading

• Understand both scientific understanding and
  scientific thinking in children.
• Understand and be able to evaluate theories of
  scientific reasoning and conceptual change.
• Know and be able to evaluate current research on
  scientific thought and the implications this
  research has for theories.
• Essential Reading (on Digital Resources)
• Garnham, A. Oakhill, J. (1994). Thinking and
  reasoning. Oxford Blackwell. Ch 17. pp.317-339
• Wellman, H. M., Hickling, A. K. Schult, C. A.
  (2000). Young children's psychological, physical,
  and biological explanations. In K. Lee (Ed),
  Childhood cognitive development the essential
  readings. Malden, Mass Oxford
• Further Reading
• See lecture webpage or .pdf handout

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Questions to ask

• What are childrens scientific thinking
  abilities?
• Is scientific thought/understanding
  domain-specific?
• What do the theories say about the development of
  scientific thinking skills?
• What research evidence is there in support of or
  against these theories?