Poster #35 - Scientific Reasoning in Preschool: Retest Effects on Recognizing Contrastive, but not Controlled, Tests

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

Integrative Statement

The causal learning literature has yielded a large body of evidence for young children's understanding of cause-effect relations, an understanding highly relevant to scientific reasoning. However, there is also a great deal of individual variation in many studies, with only about half the sample succeeding in a task (e.g. Cook et al., 2011). It is difficult to tell whether children's failures indicate a lack of conceptual understanding or whether they are due to more superficial factors such as the novelty of tasks. To test for conceptual deficits in a scientific reasoning task, we investigated whether children benefit from a second exposure to a task two weeks later (t1 & t2). We developed a paradigm, using a blicket detector (Gopnik & Sobel, 2000), to investigate understanding of the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS; Chen & Klahr, 1999) in preschoolers (N = 31, Mage = 59.7 months; age range: 44-77 months). CVS poses major conceptual problems to older children, continuing through adolescence, in tasks that require spontaneous use of the strategy but is greatly simplified in choice tasks (Bullock & Ziegler, 1999). We do not yet know whether preschoolers face a conceptual problem in CVS choice tasks. In the present study, children must select a “good” test for a hypothesis about the cause of a light effect. The experimenter placed a stick of two or three differently colored bricks on a “light box” and the box lit up. Children were instructed to find out if the X brick (e.g. blue brick) was a lighter. To do so, they could pick one stick, from two or three options, to place on the box. In each task, there is one correct stick that varies the X brick and keeps the other bricks the same. The other options vary either two or three bricks. The 2-choice task required performing a contrastive test and the 3-choice task required performing a controlled test. Results showed that in the contrastive test, participants performed better at t2 (M = .81, SE = .072) than at t1 (M = .45, SE = .091), t(30) = –3.25, p < .01, r = .51. Thirteen children improved and 2 children got worse. Twelve children were consistently correct in both sessions and 4 were consistently incorrect. In the controlled test, there was no difference in performance from t1 (M = .52, SE = .084) to t2 (M = .55, SE = .080), t(28) = –.338, p = .738, r = .19. Eight children improved and 8 children got worse. Seven children were consistently correct and 6 were consistently incorrect. Our results indicate that preschoolers understand the concept of a variable and of a contrastive test, however they struggle when faced with the 3-choice, controlled test, which tests for CVS understanding. These findings are consistent with the interpretation that children face conceptual problems in understanding CVS but could also be due to the increased working memory load of additional variables. Future research is needed to disentangle these factors.

Authors

• April C Moeller, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
  Presenting Author

• Beate Sodian, LMU Munich
  Non-Presenting Author