Poster #30 - "How do Cheetahs run Fast?": Understanding Differences in how Preschoolers Evaluate Causal Biological Explanations.

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

During early childhood, children start to demonstrate an interest in biology and an understanding of basic biological facts (e.g., cheetahs run really fast). However, little is known about how children come to understand the mechanisms that underlie these biological facts (e.g., how a cheetah runs really fast). This study aimed to understand children’s evaluations of how well different quality explanations answered ‘how’ questions about biological causal events.

For Experiment 1, 67 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds were asked to rate how well mechanistic explanations (i.e., described the underlying mechanism of a causal event), teleological explanations (i.e., suggested an event occurs for a specific purpose), circular explanations (i.e., reiterated information from the question without explaining how the event occurred), and non-explanations (i.e., provided no new meaningful information) answered ‘how’ questions about biological events. For each biological event, children heard a causal question about an animal (e.g., how does a caterpillar change into a butterfly) and were given each of the 4 explanation types to answer that question. Children were asked whether each explanation answered the question ‘a lot,’ ‘a little,’ or ‘not at all.’ Afterwards, children’s verbal intelligence was measured through the Picture Vocabulary Test and prior biological knowledge was assessed with the animism interview and the body parts interview by Zaitchik, Iqbal, & Carey (2014). Results indicated that 6-year-olds were better than 4- and 5-year-olds at recognizing that mechanistic explanations were good and non-explanations were poor at answering the questions (see Figure 1). In addition, both verbal intelligence and prior biological knowledge were linked to better performance for these two types of explanations.

To further examine the weaker performance of 4- and 5-year-olds in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 provided 44 4- and 5-year-old children with a simpler explanation evaluation task. Children were asked to sort mechanistic and non-explanations into the boxes based on whether they were helpful answers or not helpful answers to ‘how’ questions about biological events. Test items about situational events that might warrant mechanistic explanations and non-explanations (e.g., how did the pizza disappear from the refrigerator) were also added in order to determine if difficulty with sorting explanations was specific to the biological domain. Overall, children tended to either say that both mechanistic explanations and non-explanations were helpful answers to ‘how’ questions or to sort randomly (see Figure 2). However, for non-explanations for situational items, 5-year-olds sorted them as unhelpful at better than chance levels. In addition, the more frequently children sorted biological non-explanations into the unhelpful box, the better they performed on both verbal intelligence and biological knowledge tests; no such relationship was found for how frequently children sorted mechanistic explanations into the helpful box.

These studies help to characterize changes in development in how children evaluate biological explanations. Moreover, they provide evidence for possible reasons for these differences: improvements in verbal intelligence and biological knowledge may help children be more sensitive to explanation quality. Alternative explanations as well as implications for how we approach early education in both formal and informal settings will be discussed.

Authors

• Kaitlin Rose Sands, The University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Candice Mills, The University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author