Parent-Child Conversations About Claims With Conflicting Evidence: Individual Variation and Links to Children's Reasoning

• In Event: Patterns of Questions and Explanations in Family Interactions: Tools Young Children Use for Acquiring Knowledge

Abstract

Understanding how children learn to reason about cause and effect, and engage in explanatory thinking in general, has been of interest for decades. Recent work is making strides to understand the conditions under which children engage in causal reasoning, the features of different types of reasoning, and how adult intervention can shift reasoning patterns (e.g., Legare, Gelman, &Wellman, 2010; Muentener & Schulz, 2012). Although age-related patterns emerge, there is often substantial individual variation in performance within age groupings. Much of the research on potential sources of individual variation in children’s developing causal reasoning has focused on their acquisition of information-processing strategies (Klahr, 2000; Siegler, 2002) and their construction of theories based on experience (Gopnik et al., 2004; Schulz, Bonawitz, Griffiths, 2007). These approaches leave largely ignored the socio-cultural contexts in which children engage in causal reasoning with other people (Callanan & Jipson, 2001). Relatively little is known about patterns of causal reasoning practices that children engage in across development, across contexts, and within family activity, which are important aspects of understanding children’s development.

This study investigated the socio-cultural supports children have available in learning to evaluate evidence and explanations in relation to causal claims. How might conversations with parents guide children’s thinking about causal claims when there is conflicting evidence and plausible explanations for the evidence? Mothers and 5- to 7-year-olds (N=45) read stories containing science-related claims (e.g., milk makes bones strong), with conflicting evidence (e.g., two children drink milk and one gets broken bones while the other does not) and plausible explanations for each piece of evidence (e.g., milk has calcium that builds bones vs. exercise, not milk, makes strong bones). Half of the stories contained claims for which mothers held a prior belief (milk example), and half did not (e.g., a new drink improves heart health). When mothers held a prior belief, they were less likely to agree with the evidence that conflicted with their belief, and more likely to agree with the explanations that supported their belief. When mothers did not have a prior belief, they were more likely to ask the child which of the two explanations makes more sense, indicating that mothers relied more on plausible explanations as evidence to support a claim. Thus, family conversations might be one context in which children learn that good explanations can be privileged over empirical evidence. There is evidence for this potential link, as children whose mothers discussed the evidence in the stories less frequently were less likely to rely on patterns of empirical evidence, over plausible explanations, to make causal judgments in a solo reasoning task. This may suggest that for some families, under certain conditions, a good explanation can serve as evidence of a claim. These findings challenge interpretations from other studies of family explanatory conversations, which do not take into account the ways in which families define “evidence.” Implications will be discussed for research on family learning in informal environments and for the design of informal learning environments.

Author

• Megan R. Luce, Stanford University