3-183 - When is Knowledge Justified? Investigating Children’s Epistemic Understanding

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Much of what children come to know about the world is acquired through verbal interactions, called testimony. Although extensive research has focused on the cues that young children use when determining whether or not an informant is a good source of information (e.g., Harris et al., 2018), less research has focused on how young children navigate and hone their understanding of reliability when several other epistemologically valid cues are present.
This symposium bridges work on children’s learning from others with research exploring children’s reasoning about evidence, focusing on multiple factors that might impact how children evaluate whether others’ claims to knowledge are justified. Furthermore, this symposium will discuss the prevalence of individual differences in children’s epistemological reasoning, which may have implications for the development of later critical thinking skills.
Paper 1 examines children’s use of verification as a cue for reliability, with a focus on the consequences of competing epistemic cues. Paper 2 investigates whether young children can successfully engage in this kind of epistemic reasoning with respect to the credibility of second-order sources, specifically written text. Paper 3 focuses on the variability in children’s epistemological understanding, and the role of parents’ own epistemological understanding in predicting their children’s epistemic reasoning across knowledge domains. The discussant, a leading expert on children’s learning from testimony and reasoning from evidence, will discuss the implications of these findings for the development of children’s selective social learning and epistemic reasoning.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Hailey Gibbs, University of Maryland College Park

Discussant

• Candice Mills, The University of Texas at Dallas

Individual Presentations

• Children’s Understanding of Verification is a Necessary Condition for Helpful and Effective Teaching - Presenting Author: Hailey Gibbs, University of Maryland College Park; Non-Presenting Author: Nadia S. Tavassolie, University of Maryland; Non-Presenting Author: Lucas Payne Butler, University of Maryland, College Park

• “Orange”, she Wrote: Children’s Ability to Make Inferences About the Credibility of Text Based on an Author’s Knowledge Access - Presenting Author: Ian L. Campbell, Boston University; Non-Presenting Author: Kathleen Helen Corriveau, Boston University

• Little Epistemologists: Development and Individual Differences in Children’s Epistemological Understanding - Presenting Author: Sarah Suarez, University of Minnesota; Non-Presenting Author: Melissa A Koenig, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota