Young Children's Understanding of Evidence as an Epistemic Category

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring the Intrinsic and Extrinsic Foundations of Scientific Literacy

Abstract

One of the key requirements for scientific literacy is an understanding of the fundamental role of evidence in the knowledge acquisition process (Samarapungavan, Mantzicopoulos, Patrick, & French, 2009). Recent research on causal reasoning suggests that even young children may be sensitive to the quality of evidence (Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007). Children selectively intervene to reveal cause-effect relations in the case of confounded or inconsistent evidence (Cook, Goodman, & Schulz, 2011; Legare, 2012). However, to date, young children’s explicit awareness of evidence as a source of knowledge, which is foundational to scientific thinking (Kuhn, 2014), has not been directly addressed.
The present study aimed to investigate 5- and 6-year-olds’ (N = 60) metacognition of their own knowledge and how their knowledge is constructed as a function of evidence when presented with conclusive versus confounded evidence. If children’s explicit reflections on their knowledge status (know vs. need to know more) correctly differ depending on the informativeness of evidence, this would indicate that they have an understanding of how evidence bears on knowledge. Children were presented with a light box which was activated when certain objects were put on it. Children were instructed that the aim was to find out whether a target object was an activator. In a within-subjects design, children observed a target object placed on the light box together with another object (confounded condition) and a target object placed on the light box in isolation (unconfounded condition). Evidence in the confounded condition was not sufficient to know the causal category of the target object, while the evidence in the unconfounded condition was. In each condition, children were asked whether they knew or whether they required more information to know the causal category of the target object. After each response, children were asked to justify their answer.
Results revealed that thirty children responded correctly in both conditions. Children indicated that they required more information to know the causal category of the target object in the confounded condition (32 out of 60) more often than in the unconfounded condition (3 out of 60), McNemar’s test, χ2(1) = 25.29, p < .001. Although the justification question was general and nondirective, preliminary analyses revealed that approximately 40% of the children provided evidence-based justifications where they referred to the confounded nature of evidence in the confounded condition as a reason for their lack of knowledge (e.g., [I need to know more] because you placed two cubes together).
Our findings indicate that 5- and 6-year-olds can successfully judge the status of their own knowledge in the case of confounded versus conclusive evidence in simple contexts. Children’s explicit reflections on the causal ambiguity in the case of confounded evidence suggest that they possess some metacognitive understanding of the construction of their knowledge from evidence. Thus, the present findings indicate that young children are not only sensitive to the quality of evidence, but also possess a beginning awareness of evidence as an epistemic category, which may serve as a building block for scientific literacy.

Authors

• Beate Sodian, University of Munich

• Ozgun Koksal-Tuncer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

• Cristine H Legare, The University of Texas Austin