The interaction of domain-specific knowledge and domain-general discovery strategies: a study with sinking objects.

Recent work on scientific reasoning has largely focused on either domain-specific content knowledge or domain-general reasoning knowledge. This study investigated the interaction between the 2 types of knowledge in a real-world domain in which strict control of variables was not possible. We used a context, sinking objects, in which 10-, 12-, and, 14-year-old children's strong a priori beliefs could be revealed by participant-designed experiments. The results showed that most children initially believed weight alone determined an object's sinking rate. Older, but not younger, participants typically viewed experimentation as a means of exploring the effects of attributes other than weight. However, experimentation did help all children to understand the effects of object shape and material on sinking rates. The results suggests a number of questions for further research, including how children come to understand experimentation as a matter of evaluation rather than demonstration, and the role of unexpected experimental results in driving conceptual understanding.

[1]  J. Piaget.  The Child's Conception of Physical Causality , 1927 .

[2]  R. Case.  Structures and strictures: Some functional limitations on the course of cognitive growth. , 1974 .

[3]  R. Siegler,et al.  Acquisition of formal scientific reasoning by 10- and 13-year-olds: Designing a factorial experiment. , 1975 .

[4]  Clifford R. Mynatt,et al.  Consequences of Confirmation and Disconfirmation in a Simulated Research Environment , 1978 .

[5]  Gilberte Piéraut-Le Bonniec,et al.  The development of modal reasoning : genesis of necessity and possibility notions , 1980 .

[6]  J. E. Tschirgi,et al.  Sensible reasoning: A hypothesis about hypotheses. , 1980 .

[7]  E. Phelps,et al.  The development of problem-solving strategies. , 1982, Advances in child development and behavior.

[8]  M. Chi,et al.  Network representation of a child's dinosaur knowledge. , 1983 .

[9]  S. Carey,et al.  On differentiation: A case study of the development of the concepts of size, weight, and density , 1985, Cognition.

[10]  S. Carey.  Conceptual Change in Childhood , 1985 .

[11]  Michael G. Dyer,et al.  The Role of Prior Causal Theories in Generalization , 1986, AAAI.

[12]  J. Klayman,et al.  Confirmation, Disconfirmation, and Informa-tion in Hypothesis Testing , 1987 .

[13]  David Klahr,et al.  Dual Space Search During Scientific Reasoning , 1988, Cogn. Sci..

[14]  Andrea A. diSessa,et al.  Knowledge in pieces : An evolving framework for understanding knowing and learning , 1988 .

[15]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Processes of Scientific Discovery: The Strategy of Experimentation , 1988, Cogn. Sci..

[16]  J. Klayman,et al.  Hypothesis testing in rule discovery: Strategy, structure, and content. , 1989 .

[17]  Jonathan S. Evans,et al.  Bias in human reasoning , 1990 .

[18]  D. Kuhn.  Children and adults as intuitive scientists. , 1989, Psychological review.

[19]  Susan Carey,et al.  `An experiment is when you try it and see if it works': a study of grade 7 students' understanding of the construction of scientific knowledge , 1989 .

[20]  L. Schauble,et al.  Belief revision in children: the role of prior knowledge and strategies for generating evidence. , 1990, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[21]  Beate Sodian,et al.  Young Children's Differentiation of Hypothetical Beliefs from Evidence. , 1991 .

[22]  M. Pazzani.  Influence of prior knowledge on concept acquisition: Experimental and computational results. , 1991 .

[23]  Leona Schauble,et al.  Causal Models and Experimentation Strategies in Scientific Reasoning , 1991 .

[24]  L. Schauble,et al.  Students' transition from an engineering model to a science model of experimentation , 1991 .

[25]  L. Schauble,et al.  Cross-Domain Development of Scientific Reasoning , 1992 .

[26]  Carol L. Smith,et al.  Using Conceptual Models to Facilitate Conceptual Change: The Case of Weight-Density Differentiation , 1992 .

[27]  D. Klahr,et al.  Heuristics for Scientific Experimentation: A Developmental Study , 1993, Cognitive Psychology.

[28]  Amy S. Kohn,et al.  Preschoolers' reasoning about density: will it float? , 1993, Child development.

[29]  D R Olson,et al.  Reflecting on scientific thinking: children's understanding of the hypothesis-evidence relation. , 1993, Child development.

[30]  D. Kuhn.  Strategies of Knowledge Acquisition , 1995 .

[31]  David Klahr,et al.  SCIENTIFIC THINKING ABOUT SCIENTIFIC THINKING , 1995 .

[32]  David Klahr,et al.  Scientific Thinking about Scientific Thinking. Commentary. , 1995 .

[33]  D. Klahr,et al.  When to trust the data: Further investigations of system error in a scientific reasoning task , 1996, Memory & cognition.

[34]  D. Klahr,et al.  Knowing about guessing and guessing about knowing: preschoolers' understanding of indeterminacy. , 1996, Child development.