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1.
Key elements of the structure and function of models in mathematics and science are identified. These elements are used as a basis for discussing the development of model‐based reasoning. A microgenetic study examines the beginnings of model‐based reasoning in a pair of fourth‐ and fifth‐grade children who solved several problems about chance and probability. Results are reported in the form of a cognitive model of children's problem‐solving performance. The cognitive model explains a transition in children's reasoning from tacit reliance on empirical regularity to a form of model‐based reasoning. Several factors fostering change in children's thinking are identified, including the role of notations, peer interaction, and teacher assistance. We suggest that model‐based reasoning is a slowly‐developing capability that emerges only with proper contextual and social support and that future study should be carried out in classrooms, where these forms of assistance can also be part of the object of study.

Model‐based reasoning is a significant intellectual milestone because it bridges the worlds of personal, intuitive knowledge, on the one hand, and mathematical‐scientific theory, on the other. However, across disciplines, consensus is still forming about what model‐based reasoning comprises, and there is little knowledge about its ontogenetic origins or how it develops. We consider analogy as the core of modeling, because in model‐based reasoning a system in one domain is used to understand a system in another. To understand how models come to play a role in reasoning, it is important to initiate study of their origins. Accordingly, we report a microgenetic study examining the beginnings of model‐based reasoning in a pair of young children solving problems about chance and probability. In this study we are engaged in the enterprise of modeling the development of modeling. That is, we report our results in the form of a cognitive model of children's problem‐solving performance that explains a transition in reasoning from a tacit reliance on empirical regularity to a form of model‐based reasoning. It is important to note the two distinct meanings for the term model used in this article. The first describes how children come to understand and appropriate a system of reasoning exemplified in practices of modeling. The second describes a research tool, a model of human reasoning—specifically, how children in this study began to use models of probability to reason about uncertain events. In this report, we use the terms model or model‐based reasoning to refer to the former interpretation, whereas references to a cognitive model denote the simulation of children's thinking—in this case, implemented as a computer program.

Before describing the empirical work, we first identify some key elements of the structure and function of models. Next, these elements of modeling are used as the basis for generating some conjectures about the development of model‐based reasoning. We describe a task that we used as a window to understanding progression in student reasoning toward reliance on models as tools for thought. We present our rationale for developing cognitive models of student performance and explain some choices concerning the implementation of the cognitive model reported here. Finally, we turn to the children's performance on chance and probability tasks and explain how that performance illuminates both what children do not understand about models and the kinds of relevant knowledge that they are acquiring.  相似文献   

2.
This study examined the role of computer-supported knowledge-building discourse and epistemic reflection in promoting elementary-school students’ scientific epistemology and science learning. The participants were 39 Grade 5 students who were collectively pursuing ideas and inquiry for knowledge advance using Knowledge Forum (KF) while studying a unit on electricity; they also reflected on the epistemic nature of their discourse. A comparison class of 22 students, taught by the same teacher, studied the same unit using the school’s established scientific investigation method. We hypothesised that engaging students in idea-driven and theory-building discourse, as well as scaffolding them to reflect on the epistemic nature of their discourse, would help them understand their own scientific collaborative discourse as a theory-building process, and therefore understand scientific inquiry as an idea-driven and theory-building process. As hypothesised, we found that students engaged in knowledge-building discourse and reflection outperformed comparison students in scientific epistemology and science learning, and that students’ understanding of collaborative discourse predicted their post-test scientific epistemology and science learning. To further understand the epistemic change process among knowledge-building students, we analysed their KF discourse to understand whether and how their epistemic practice had changed after epistemic reflection. The implications on ways of promoting epistemic change are discussed.  相似文献   

3.
This study examines the ways in which preschool teachers support the development of children's explanatory language through science inquiry. Two classrooms in a preschool center using a science inquiry curriculum were videotaped during a 5-week unit on color mixing. Videotapes were analyzed for how teachers facilitated children's explanatory language. An assessment of explanatory language was administered to 47 children in the center before and after the color mixing unit. Analysis of discourse revealed that teachers engaged children as conversational partners and as scientific investigators responsible for their own learning. Explanations were dynamically co-constructed by adults and children within the context of participation in scientific inquiry. By the end of the unit, children produced more on-topic responses, more standard color-mixing terms, and more causal connectives in their responses to the assessment of explanatory language.  相似文献   

4.
Research on learning and instruction of science has shown that learning environments applied in preschool and primary school rarely makes use of structured learning materials in problem-based environments although these are decisive quality features for promoting conceptual change and scientific reasoning within early science learning. We thus developed and implemented a science learning environment for children in the first years of schooling which contains structured learning materials with the goal of supporting conceptual change concerning the understanding of the floating and sinking of objects and fostering students' scientific reasoning skills. In the present implementation study, we aim to provide a best-practice example of early science learning. The study was conducted with a sample of 15 classes of the first years of schooling and a total of 244 children. Tests were constructed to measure children's conceptual understanding before and after the implementation. Our results reveal a decrease in children's misconceptions from pretest to posttest. After the curriculum, the children were able to produce significantly more correct predictions about the sinking or floating of objects than before the curriculum and also relative to a control group. Moreover, due to the intervention, the explanations given for their predictions implied a more elaborated concept of material kinds. All in all, a well-structured curriculum promoting comparison and scientific reasoning by means of inquiry learning was shown to support children's conceptual change.  相似文献   

5.
In this article I present some ideas, based on qualitative research into young children's drawing, related to the developing discourse on young children's thinking and meaning making. I question the relationship between perception and conception and the nature of representation, challenging traditional ideas around stage theory and shifting the focus from the drawings themselves to the process of drawing, and thus to the children's own purposes. I analyse examples of my observations (made in naturalistic settings within a nursery classroom) to reveal the range of representational purposes and meaning in children's drawing activity. My analysis shows that, rather than being developmentally determined, the way children configure their drawings is purposeful; children can recognise the power of drawing to represent, and that they themselves can be in control of this. I explore aspects of the process, including transformation and talk to show the importance of understanding drawing in its specific contexts. I show how children's drawing activity is illuminated by the way in which it occurs and the other activities linked to it, presenting drawing as part of children's broader, intentional, meaning‐making activity. As an aspect of the interactive, communicative practices through which children's thinking develops, representation is a constructive, self‐directed, intentional process of thinking in action, through which children bring shape and order to their experience, rather than a developing ability to make visual reference to objects in the world. I suggest that in playing with the process, children are actively defining reality rather than passively reflecting a given reality.  相似文献   

6.
This article is an attempt to describe the development of my understanding of the purpose of practitioner research over the first 4 years of a project leading to a PhD. It tells the story of the evolution of my thinking, from an initial focus on the curriculum and the children's unsophisticated thinking about race as the source of the problem, to a more self-critical stance, in which I saw ‘whiteness’ as an important factor in structuring the children's experiences of schooling. Thus, the early outward focus of the research – the children, and their response to the curriculum – was replaced by an inward focus – on my own attitudes and actions as a white teacher, and the effect they have on the children I teach. The article argues that teachers should have the opportunity to reflect on aspects of their practice in this way as an integral part of their professional development.  相似文献   

7.
Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited   总被引：2，自引：1，他引：1  
This article reviews recent research on homeschooled children's socialization. The research indicates that homeschooling parents expect their children to respect and get along with people of diverse backgrounds, provide their children with a variety of social opportunities outside the family, and believe their children's social skills are at least as good as those of other children. What homeschooled children think about their own social skills is less clear. Compared to children attending conventional schools, however, research suggest that they have higher quality friendships and better relationships with their parents and other adults. They are happy, optimistic, and satisfied with their lives. Their moral reasoning is at least as advanced as that of other children, and they may be more likely to act unselfishly. As adolescents, they have a strong sense of social responsibility and exhibit less emotional turmoil and problem behaviors than their peers. Those who go on to college are socially involved and open to new experiences. Adults who were homeschooled as children are civically engaged and functioning competently in every way measured so far. An alarmist view of homeschooling, therefore, is not supported by empirical research. It is suggested that future studies focus not on outcomes of socialization but on the process itself.  相似文献   

8.
We expect our students to learn different ways of thinking, such as historical empathy or scientific reasoning, reflection, critical analysis, or clinical reasoning. But how do we discern if they have learned these ways of thinking when thinking is often abstract, tacit and seemingly invisible? In this conceptual and theoretical article, I argue that we can discern any kind of thinking, however we define it, if we focus on the observable actions or thinking behaviours associated with that thinking. Based on this argument, I then offer a theoretical framework for teachers so they might recognise and informally assess the particular kind of student thinking they want to cultivate. This framework synthesises several important theories about how we learn to think, and distinguishes six general features a teacher might look for to be more discerning about any kind of thinking: visibility, complexity, frequency, flexibility, independence, and application of the thinking behaviours.  相似文献   

9.
Inquiry-based science education (IBSE) has been promoted as an inspiring way of learning science by engaging pupils in designing and conducting their own scientific investigations. For primary school teachers, the open nature of IBSE poses challenges as they often lack experience in supporting their pupils during the different phases of an open IBSE project, such as formulating a research question and designing and conducting an investigation. The current study aims to meet these challenges by presenting a pedagogical framework in which four domains of scientific knowledge are addressed in seven phases of inquiry. The framework is based on video analyses of pedagogical interventions by primary school teachers participating in open IBSE projects. Our results show that teachers can guide their pupils successfully through the process of open inquiry by explicitly addressing the conceptual, epistemic, social and/or procedural domain of scientific knowledge in the subsequent phases of inquiry. The paper concludes by suggesting further research to validate our framework and to develop a pedagogy for primary school teachers to guide their pupils through the different phases of open inquiry.  相似文献   

10.
Efforts have been made to promote children's interest in science, but little is known about how children's interest in science relates to other characteristics, such as science‐specific curiosity, domain‐general epistemic curiosity, and verbal intelligence. The current study examines how these factors relate to individual differences in children's self‐reported interest in science topics. Children 7‐ to 10‐years‐old (n = 91) rated their interest in science and non‐science topics and completed measures of science‐specific curiosity, domain‐general epistemic curiosity, and verbal intelligence. An additional 94 7‐ to 10‐year‐olds rated their interest in science and non‐science topics and completed the science‐specific curiosity measure. The results suggest that individual differences in children's science interest relate most strongly to scientific curiosity, and specifically to the drive to seek out information and new experiences.  相似文献   

11.
Some intensive quantities, such as slope, velocity, or likelihood, are perceptually privileged in the sense that they are experienced as holistic, irreducible sensations. However, the formal expression of these quantities uses a/b analytic metrics; for example, the slope of a line is the quotient of its rise and run. Thus, whereas students' sensation of an intensive quantity could serve as a powerful resource for grounding its formal expression, accepting the mathematical form requires students to align the sensation with a new way of reasoning about the phenomenon. I offer a case analysis of a middle school student who successfully came to understand the intensive quantity of likelihood. The analysis highlights a form of reasoning called abduction and suggests that sociocognitive processes can guide and mediate students' abductive reasoning. Interpreting the child's and tutor's multimodal action through the lens of abductive inference, I demonstrate the emergence of a proportional concept as guided mediated objectification of tacit perception. This “gestalt first” process is contrasted with traditional “elements first” approaches to building proportional concepts, and I speculate on epistemic and cognitive implications of this contrast for the design and instruction of these important concepts. In particular, my approach highlights an important source of epistemic difficulty for students as they learn intensive quantities: the difficulty in shifting from intuitive perceptual conviction to mediated disciplinary analysis. My proposed conceptualization of learning can serve as an effective synthesis of traditional and reform-based mathematics instruction.  相似文献   

12.
I argue for a view of critical thinking and learning as a fallibilistic epistemic process of inquiry and evaluation, which is grounded in human fallibility. I show how this plausible view is different from other views, in that it is predicated not only on individual thinking alone but also on group thinking as it affects the individual in the context of a group discussion. The individualistic rational view of critical thinking only specifies the process or method that one may individually use to evaluate beliefs or the evidence that one brings to bear on one's doxastic attitude or judgment. This view does not specify the nature and scope of evidence that one may need to evaluate. I argue that evaluating a belief in the context of having a substantial amount of available evidence in a social group is important for determining whether one thinks critically. There is epistemic advantage in evaluating a broad scope of available evidence in a group discussion, which does not exist otherwise. I assume that group discussion is a pedagogical tool, which under the right social conditions, is likely to bring about learning and the acquisition of critical thinking abilities. The right social conditions for group discussion can optimize reasonableness by a process which involves cognitive division of labor and epistemic prudence. An individual can evaluate on his or her own only a limited amount of evidence; sometimes we may need to rely on the evidence that others have already evaluated which they may reasonably accept, given their cognitive comparative advantage. I distinguish among three plausible learning outcomes of the process of critical thinking, which indicate cognitive division of labor and comparative epistemic advantage in a group discussion.  相似文献   

13.
Multiple studies (n = 1065 parents, 625 females, 437 males, 3 nonbinary, 99.06% White; n = 80, 5 to 7-year-old children, 35 girls, 45 boys, 87.50% White; data collection September 2017–January 2021) investigated White U.S. parents' thinking about White children's Black-White racial biases. In Studies 1–3, parents reported that their own and other children would not express racial biases. When predicting children's social preferences for Black and White children (Study 2), parents underestimated their own and other children's racial biases. Reading an article about the nature, prevalence, and consequences of White children's racial biases (Study 3) increased parents' awareness of, concern about, and motivation to address children's biases (relative to a control condition). The findings have implications for engaging White parents to address their children's racial biases.  相似文献   

14.
Seven elementary teachers participated in a project designed to help them learn to teach mathematics according to reform recommendations. Teachers were provided opportunities to learn through both private reflection and public inquiry about their teaching and children's learning. The teachers’ instruction, reflection, and beliefs were studied. All of the teachers adopted some reform-based procedures including having children report problem-solving strategies. However, only three of them developed more complex practice in which children were involved in inquiry into one another's strategies. The groups had different beliefs about the autonomy of children to construct mathematics and their own autonomy to make instructional decisions.  相似文献   

15.
Present standards include creative and critical thinking among dispositions essential for the teaching profession. While teaching introductory courses in educational psychology, I have noticed that even though students can easily describe critical thinking in the abstract, they rarely and reluctantly engage in thinking critically about their own educational experiences. Emphasis on assessment of critical thinking dispositions and skills requires students to demonstrate “the right way to think.” This emphasis, I argue, decreases students' inclination to practice critical inquiry and to feel this experience as intrinsically rewarding. Exploration of socio-cultural contexts of my own and my students' upbringing helps understand how such contexts condition the critical thinking practice. I offer the cultural-historical theory of Lev Vygotsky as an alternative frame of reference that will help students practice critical thinking in an educational psychology classroom.  相似文献   

16.
To engage in discussions of artwork meaning is to engage in critical reasoning, a factor that is central to the interpretation of artworks in the art classroom. While this may appear as a common‐sense claim that reflects the tacit assumptions most art educators have about students' critical dispositions in art, it is also evident that little is known about the deeper structures underlying students’ critical reasoning and how such structures shape students’ interpretations of artworks. Drawing on my research on students’ theories of critical meaning in art, this article explores the nature of practical and theoretical constraints on students’ critical reasoning about the meaning of artworks. I account for how intentional beliefs, language and representational artefacts function as a nexus of real constraints that condition students’ advance into interpretations of the social meaning of art. After briefly outlining the design and methodology of my study, I examine students’ critical reasoning performances during the formative period of development between middle to late childhood. The findings reveal that with increasing age students gradually learn to exercise their own critical intentions and represent inferences that acknowledge the significance of constitutive rules and force of a collective intentionality in the artworld on their interpretations of artworks as artefacts. I then make some conclusions about the relationship of domain‐specific shifts in art understanding, the role of intentionality, representational understanding, beliefs about art and reasoning skills to the linguistic, theoretical and artefactual constraints conditioning students’ intuitive advance into real understandings of art.  相似文献   

17.
Nowadays, early science education is well-accepted by researchers, education professionals and policy makers. Overall, teachers’ attitudes and conceptions toward the science subject domain and science education influence their ways of teaching and engagement. However, there is a lack of research regarding factors that affect this engagement in pre-school years. The main assumption of this study is that teachers’ attitudes regarding science in pre-school can shape children's engagement in science and develop their scientific curiosity. Therefore, the main objectives of this study are to investigate the attitudes of pre-school teachers toward engaging in science and to explore their views about the nature of curiosity: who is a curious child and how can a child's natural curiosity be fostered? An extensive survey was conducted among 146 pre-school teachers by employing both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Results indicate that most of the participants believe that scientific education should begin in early childhood; very young children can investigate and take part in a process of inquiry; and scientific activities in pre-school can influence children's long-term attitudes toward science. Despite these views, most participants felt they did not possess sufficient scientific knowledge. Furthermore, participants expressed diverse opinions when asked to identify what constitutes curiosity, how the curious child can be identified and how a child's curiosity can be fostered. The research findings carry significant implications regarding how to implement scientific activities in pre-school, and how to encourage pre-school teachers to engage children in scientific activities in a way that will nurture their natural curiosity.  相似文献   

18.
Research on young children's reasoning show the complex relationships of knowledge, theories, and evidence in their decision-making and problem solving. Most of the research on children's reasoning skills has been done in individualized and formal research settings, not collective classroom environments where children often engage in learning and reasoning together to solve classroom problems. This study posits children's reasoning as a collective social activity that can occur in science classrooms. The study examined how children process their reasoning within the context of Grade 2/3 science classrooms and how the process of collectivity emerges from classroom interactions and dialogue between children as they attempt to solve their classroom problems. The study findings suggest that children's reasoning involves active evaluation of theories and evidence through collective problem solving, with consensus being developed through dialogical reasoning.  相似文献   

19.
This study examined young children's contact with individuals of high-wealth and low-wealth backgrounds and their behavior toward peers of these backgrounds in a resource distribution task. The sample included 72 ethnically diverse higher income children (Mage = 6.68 years, SD = 0.98 years). Contact with individuals of low-wealth backgrounds (interwealth contact) affected children's behavior indirectly, through social-cognitive reasoning processes. The more interwealth contact children reported, the more likely they were to reason about access to resources rather than their own wealth preferences in this context. This reasoning, in turn, was associated with more resources allocated to a low-wealth peer relative to a high-wealth peer. Thus, interwealth contact early in development was associated with more equitable peer interactions.  相似文献   

20.
When asked questions, children often avert their gaze. Furthermore, the frequency of such gaze aversion (GA) is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing, suggesting that GA is a good indicator of children's thinking and comprehension. However, little is known about how teachers detect and interpret such gaze signals. In Study 1 teaching interactions were analysed to determine teachers' responses to different patterns of children's eye gaze. In Study 2 a different group of teachers completed a questionnaire assessing their awareness of GA in determining children's thinking, understanding, and interest. Results showed that teachers did not typically respond to children's GA in predicted ways and did not associate GA with children's thinking. However, when asked explicitly about GA cues they made predictions relating to question difficulty and children's thinking in line with empirical work. We conclude that while teachers have an implicit understanding of GA cues, they typically do not make full use of such cues during classroom teaching.  相似文献   

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