Thinking counterfactually supports children's ability to conduct a controlled test of a hypothesis

Children often fail to control variables when conducting tests of hypotheses, yielding confounded evidence. We propose that getting children to think of alternative possibilities through counterfactual prompts may scaffold their ability to control variables, by engaging them in an imagined intervention that is structurally similar to controlled actions in scientific experiments. Findings provide preliminary support for this hypothesis. Seven- to 10-year-olds who were prompted to think counterfactually showed better performance on post-test control of variables tasks than children who were given control prompts. These results inform debates about the contribution of counterfactual reasoning to scientific reasoning, and suggest that counterfactual prompts may be useful in science learning contexts

Asking "why?" and "what if?": The influence of questions on children's inferences

This chapter describes a growing body of work that demonstrates the efficacy of specific questions (“why” “why else?” and “what if?”) in supporting children’s ability to access their intuitive reasoning skills and apply them to tasks involving sophisticated causal and scientific thinking. We describe distinct mechanisms by which each of these questions results in unique types of inferences, and argue that each one has selective effects on a learner’s inferences, depending upon the evidence available, the state of their prior knowledge, and the relation of that prior knowledge to the true state of the world. We begin with a brief review of the well-established research on the efficacy of prompts for explanation, focusing on the developmental literature. We then offer a novel proposal, drawing on the adult research, that engaging children in the evaluation of alternative outcomes via prompting for multiple explanations or engagement with counterfactuals may provide a different avenue for fostering distinct sets of causal reasoning skills. Finally, we turn to a discussion of the relation between the content and process of children’s reasoning in response to these questions, and end with some suggestions for future research