Children's Developing Understanding of Evidence as a Justification for a Claim

• In Event: Learning to Argue From Evidence

Abstract

Children’s attainment of theory of mind is commonly assumed to be the watershed moment in understanding how people might assert different beliefs over the same matter of fact. In the false-beliefs task, 4-5-year-old children recognize that someone with incorrect information will form a different belief about an event than someone with correct information. Different claims are understood to arise when there are two sets of “facts,” one associated with a real event and the other with a different event mistakenly assumed to be real. However, people may well make different claims about an event even when they have the same information. With an interpretive theory of mind (iToM), attained at about age 7, children understand that people might disagree because they interpret the same information differently. With this, it appears that children with iToM recognize that a claim need not be self-evident, but that information can be used as evidence for more than one claim. This research tests whether children who have this iToM understanding are more aware of the need to generate relevant evidence and use such evidence to justify a claim when there are competing claims. A close look at the reasoning of those before and after attaining iToM provides insight into an aspect of children’s development that serves as a basis for their developing ability to argue from evidence.

In this study, 227 children, starting at the ages of 5-8, were assessed over three years for iToM (Lalonde & Chandler, 2002). They also responded to a story in which two experts disagree about a biological phenomenon. They were asked why the two experts did not agree, what they would do to decide on an explanation of the phenomenon, and how someone could decide about the correctness of a third person’s claim about the phenomenon. They were then interviewed more generally with questions such as: “Is it possible for two people to see exactly the same thing and think different things from each other?” “What is the difference between saying ‘I know something’ and ‘I guess something’?” “If you do not know something, what can you do to know it?”

We chose those with the highest (n = 14) and lowest (n = 14) number of iToM responses in the first wave, and performed qualitative analyses on their story task and follow-up interview responses. The qualitative analyses showed that those who had developed iToM were notably more likely to attribute differences between two people to the way they interpreted or generated the information and then used the information as the basis for their claims. In addition, in almost all cases there was development from the first to the third year in the understanding of the sources of differences and how claims might be justified.

This study shows that the early epistemic understanding about the possibility of making different claims from information about an event provides a basis for understanding the need to justify a claim against alternatives and prompts development of understanding the means to justify.

Authors

• Michael P. Weinstock, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Vardit Israel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev