17 research outputs found
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Informative experimentation in intuitive science: Children select and learn from their own causal interventions.
We investigated whether children preferentially select informative actions and make accurate inferences from the outcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task. Four- to six-year-olds were presented with a novel system composed of gears that could operate according to two possible causal structures (single or multiple cause). Given the choice between interventions (i.e., removing one of the two gears to observe the remaining gear in isolation), children demonstrated a clear preference for the action that revealed the true causal structure, and made subsequent causal judgments that were consistent with the outcome observed. Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that performance was driven by children's tendency to select an intervention that would produce a desirable effect (i.e., spinning gears), rather than to disambiguate the causal structure. These results replicate our initial findings in a context in which the informative action was less likely to produce a positive outcome than the uninformative one. Experiment 3 serves as a control demonstrating that children's success in the previous experiments is not due to their use of low-level strategies. We discuss these findings in terms of their significance for understanding the development of scientific reasoning and the role of self-directed actions in early causal learning
The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning
Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers
Informative experimentation in intuitive science: Children select and learn from their own causal interventions.
A Tale of Three Platforms: Investigating Preschoolers' Second-Order Inferences Using In-Person, Zoom, and Lookit Methodologies.
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Explaining the Self-Directed Learner as an Intuitive (Causal) Scientist
Self-directed learning in early childhood often approximates knowledge acquisition in science. Both processes require inquiry (generating informative evidence) and inference (drawing appropriate conclusions from evidence). However, despite being prodigious informal exploratory learners, children typically struggle with inquiry and inference in formal scientific reasoning. This disconnect poses a puzzling problem for researchers who explain self-directed learning as 'intuitive science' and for educators charged with teaching children to engage in scientific thinking.In this dissertation, I aim to resolve this disconnect by providing a more accurate understanding of the intuitive abilities that drive self-directed learning. Chapter 2 examines the early, implicit sensitivity to incomplete information underlying children's preference for exploring uncertainties documented by past research. Chapter 3 provides the first empirical contest between two competing theories of self-directed learning and demonstrates young children's preference to select and ability to learn from informative interventions in their own actions. Chapter 4 reexamines long-standing assumptions about the experimental errors made by self-directed learners in scientific reasoning tasks. Far from misunderstanding the need for or nature of controlled experimentation, the results of this study suggest that learners' approach to these tasks is consistent with the logic of competent causal hypothesis testing.
The results of these three studies show that young learners' scientific errors do not stem from either inability or unwillingness to engage in inquiry and inference. Instead, it suggests that self-directed learners' intuitive approach to generating and interpreting evidence is shaped by the complexities and concerns of causal learning. Chapter 5 outlines this novel proposal, explaining how it draws on interventionist causal philosophy and how it allows for reinterpretation of self-directed learners' seemingly uninformative or irrational behaviors. I will argue that the evidence for children's successes in informal exploration and failures in formal experimentation are consistent with approaching inquiry and inference as competent causal learners. Taken together, my dissertation work offers a unified explanation of early self-directed learning and points out a novel path toward better understanding the nature of learning in childhood
Rethinking the âgapâ: Selfâdirected learning in cognitive development and scientific reasoning
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Clarifying the Causal Logic of a Classic Control of Variables Task
Self-directed learners are often described as âintuitive scientistsâ, yet they also tend to struggle in assessments of their scientific reasoning. We investigate a novel explanation for this apparent gap between formal and informal scientific inquiry. Specifically, we consider whether learnersâ documented failure to correctly apply the control of variables strategy might stem from a mismatch between their causal intuitions and task presentation. Children (7- and 9-year-olds) and adults were tested on a version of a traditional multivariate reasoning task (Tschirgi, 1980) that we modified to clarify ambiguous elements of the causal logic. A significant majority of participants in all age groups selected informative experiments on this modified task, avoiding confounded actions with positive tangible outcomes. This finding contrasts with the longstanding claim that learners do not correctly employ control of variables without extensive training and suggests that self-directed scientific inquiry may be intuitively suited to support causal learning goals