Supporting, contradictory, or irrelevant?: Children's evaluation of evidence for scientific claims

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Using evidence to evaluate a new scientific claim is a critical skill; however, the relevance and the support of the available evidence can vary. Children have some sense of what makes evidence relevant and irrelevant, although there is significant improvement in children’s ability to evaluate relevance between ages 5 and 10 (Danovitch, Mills, Duncan, Williams, & Girouard, 2020; Johnston, Sheskin, & Keil, 2019). The current project extends the existing literature by examining how children identify and distinguish evidence that supports, contradicts, or is irrelevant in the evaluation of scientific claims.

Children ages 7-8 (N = 28) and ages 9-10 (N = 24) were told that they were going to be detectives and sort clues about animal behavior (e.g., why a killdeer pretends to have a broken wing when a predator approaches its nest; see Table 1 for full examples). For each of 6 animals, children heard a character make a guess (i.e., hypothesis) about why an animal behaves in a certain way (e.g., “Bill guesses that the killdeer pretends to have a broken wing so that the predator follows it away from the nest instead of going near the eggs”). Children then heard 3 different types of clues (i.e., observations/evidence) that related to the animal: supporting, irrelevant, and contradictory. For each clue, children indicated whether it was related to the guess, and if so, the degree to which it supported or contradicted the guess. Children’s responses were then recoded into a 1-5 scale: really contradicts, sort of contradicts, not related, sort of supports, and really supports. After the primary experimental task, children completed the Picture Vocabulary Task (PVT; a measure of children’s verbal intelligence), a 15-item Biological Knowledge Test, and the Cognitive Reflection Task for Kids (CRT-D; a measure of children’s tendency to override an intuitive response to engage in reflection to solve problems; Young & Shtulman, 2020).

Overall, participants gave supporting evidence ratings that were above chance, and significantly higher than their ratings of the irrelevant and contradictory evidence (see Figure 1). However, children’s ratings of irrelevant and contradictory evidence did not significantly differ, and neither varied significantly from the midpoint of the scale. After controlling for age, PVT and Biological Knowledge Test Scores related to higher ratings for relevant clues (rs > .34, ps < .02), but no measures related to ratings of contradictory evidence (rs < .20, ps > .16).
These results suggest that children of this age are able to recognize supporting evidence, but they struggle to distinguish contradictory evidence from irrelevant evidence. One possible explanation for this finding is that children of this age may have more experience trying to confirm rather than to disconfirm claims and need more scaffolding to help them understand contradictory evidence. Alternatively, the design of the experiment required children to first categorize clues as related or not related to the hypothesis, and as such, may have led children to categorize anything that did not clearly support the hypothesis to be irrelevant. Ongoing research examines these possibilities.

Authors

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

• Judith H Danovitch, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anthuanet Espinel, University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anthony J Monroe, The University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Alessandra Stagni, University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author