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oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/21924 2023-07-10 col_2142_5131 col_2142_8800 com_2142_5130 com_2142_5132

Brewer, William F. Samarapungavan, Ala 2011-05-07T13:23:21Z 2011-05-07T13:23:21Z 10000-01-01 1990 "The aim of this research was to explore the knowledge acquisition process in natural science domains. Recently, there has been much debate on the utility of the ""child-as-scientist"" metaphor as a way of characterizing children's knowledge acquisition. Proponents of the child-as-scientist approach ascribe apparent differences in child and adult thinking in science domains to differences in knowledge rather than to differences in underlying reasoning processes. However, critics of this view claim that children differ from scientists in that they lack certain metacognitive competencies that characterize mature scientific reasoning." This research examined whether children could use such metaconceptual criteria as the range of explanation, non ad-hocness of explanation, empirical consistency, and logical consistency to choose from among competing accounts of physical phenomena. Children's ability to apply the metaconceptual criteria was examined in a series of theory choice tasks. The tasks were constructed so that the conceptual content of the theories to be evaluated was either compatible, incompatible, or neutral with regard to children's prior knowledge frameworks. The subjects were elementary school students from grades 1, 3, and 5. It was found that even children in the first grade proved sensitive to the range, empirical consistency, and logical consistency of theories when the conceptual content of the theories did not violate their beliefs about the physical world. The youngest children were not sensitive to the ad-hocness of explanations but older children did prefer non ad hoc explanations to ad hoc ones. These findings are consistent with recent work in the philosophy of science showing that in evaluating theoretical alternatives, scientists are influenced by their prior beliefs about the domain being considered. The findings support the view that many apparent differences in the thinking of children and adults stem from difference in knowledge rather than reasoning. They also demonstrate that young children share some of the cognitive underpinnings of scientific rationality that scientists do. Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-07T13:23:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license.txt: 4922 bytes, checksum: 910b249b4beec47e7ab768910c8f966f (MD5) 9026313.pdf: 6096023 bytes, checksum: af402241754cde5d4ed9dba6c5c3f4c6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1990 Item marked as restricted to the 'UIUC Users [automated]' Group (id=2) by Howard Ding (hding2@illinois.edu) on 2011-05-07T14:54:07Z Item is restricted indefinitely. Restriction data tranferred 2014-07-01T11:25:07-05:00 Original Data Group with Access UIUC Users [automated] Release Date: none Reason: ETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permission ETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permission U of I Only AAI9026313 (UMI)AAI9026313 http://hdl.handle.net/2142/21924 eng Copyright 1990 Samarapungavan, Ala Education, Educational Psychology Psychology, Developmental Children's metajudgments in theory choice tasks: An investigation of scientific rationality in childhood text Education Education University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D.