Review of Educational Research http://rer.aera.net
Constraints or Guideposts? Developmental Psychology and Science Education Deanna Kuhn REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 1997 67: 141 DOI: 10.3102/00346543067001141 The online version of this article can be found at: http://rer.sagepub.com/content/67/1/141
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Review of Educational Research Spring 1997, Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 141-150
Constraints or Guideposts? Developmental Psychology and Science Education Deanna Kuhn Teachers College, Columbia University Metz (1995) criticizes "developmentally based" science curricula as inappropriately constraining science instruction to activities that bear little resemblance to authentic scientific inquiry, which she recommends as a more productive model for science education. Here, 1 reflect on Metz recommendations, consider whether research and theory in developmental psychology stand to inform science educators' pursuit of directions of the sort Metz advocates, and propose a "guideposts “ rather than "constraints “ model of how developmental psychology might inform science educators' efforts. In a recent article in this journal, "Reassessment of Developmental Constraints on Children's Science Instruction," Kathleen Metz (1995) carefully reviews a wide array of research and theory in developmental psychology having implications for science education. She finds much wrong with how this literature has shaped the efforts of science educators in recent years. In particular, she is critical of the application of Piaget's theory of cognitive development to science education. Weaknesses inherent in Piaget's theory, as well as misreadings of it, Metz claims, have led to underestimation of children's competence and potential for science instruction. The result has been inappropriate and unproductive "developmentally based" science curricula that unnecessarily confine the child to "concrete" activities (largely observing and classifying) rather than more authentic scientific inquiry. In a more positive vein, Metz goes on to recommend a new direction for science education. First, attention should be focused on instruction, not assessment (especially assessment directed toward establishing developmental constraints on instruction): "The issue of what children can accomplish with instruction is more relevant than static assessments of what they achieve without instruction" (p. 108). Second, instruction should engage children in "authentic" scientific activity, suitably simplified but modeled on that of professional science. Accordingly, and third, this activity should be situated in a social context. Metz briefly describes some new approaches that illustrate these recommendations, and, overall, makes a persuasive case that they offer a more vital and exciting agenda for science education than the "developmentally based" science curricula that preceded them. Although I would differ with her in some respects, my purpose here is not to quarrel with Metz's analysis of the application of Piagetian theory to science education. She argues persuasively that much has gone wrong in science education in recent years, and dubious application of Piagetian theory clearly bears at least some of the blame. My concern, rather, is with an unfortunate—and, I 141 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net at Lanzhou University on July 28, 2011
Kuhn believe, incorrect—implication that might be drawn from Metz's analysis, namely, that science educators are more likely to be misled than informed by efforts to apply cognitive development theory and research to their concerns and that they would be well advised to look elsewhere for guidance and inspiration. The specific questions considered here are (a) the soundness of the new directions Metz proposes for science education, (b) whether empirical research can and should inform the pursuit of such directions, and, more broadly, (c) how the relation between science education and developmental psychology should be conceived. To anticipate my argument, I claim that empirical study of the cognitive development of children and adolescents has a critical contribution to make to the science education agenda that Metz recommends, and that without this contribution its feasibility is undermined. Furthermore, I suggest that developmental theory and research should be regarded not as dictating constraints on science education—the model that Metz examines and rejects—but rather as providing guideposts that identify directions and processes of cognitive development and thereby serve to inform science educators' efforts. Defining the Task Although Metz does not elaborate her recommendations in detail, she describes the kinds of collaborative cognitive activity she advocates as a central thrust of science instruction as involving groups of children "posing questions, gathering and interpreting data, and revising their theories" (p. 121). These are, of course, the authentic activities of real science that Metz believes children need to experience, and I agree with her that even young children have the potential to engage productively in them. Yet Metz makes clear that the objective goes even further than engaging children in real science as an end in itself. She claims that these activities should have a strong metacognitive aspect, one that would help to overcome what she accepts as a genuine weakness that children have in secondorder reflection on their own thought: Capitalizing on social interaction within the science classroom can help children make their ideas explicit and subject them to criticism. Exploration of such ideas as theory, evidence, and hypothesis can support children's formulation and identification of their instantiations in their own and others' thinking, (p. 108) Engaging children in simple forms of scientific inquiry and enhancing their metacognitive awareness are objectives hard to regard as other than laudatory. But what is entailed in implementing them? What are the impediments and challenges likely to be encountered? Current understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry is at best incomplete. Whether carried out by professionals or novices, it entails the coordination of theory and evidence and is an intrinsically complex activity. Metacognition is even less observable and certainly no less complex (Schraw & Moshman, 1995). How then, ideally, might science educators go about designing, monitoring, and evaluating the engagement of children in the kind of complex activity Metz advocates, an activity involving social, cognitive, and metacognitive dimensions? My claim is that to undertake such a task, science educators will need to know a great deal about the relevant individual and social competencies and the direc142 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net at Lanzhou University on July 28, 2011
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tions and processes involved in their development. Some data of this sort are available now, but many more are needed. Without turning to such data as a resource, science educators face what is at best a formidable task in both designing educational activities and evaluating them. How do we identify and describe what children are doing, both individually and collectively, in such settings, and against what criteria do we evaluate their activities? Can we define and assess the competencies we would like children to take away from these activities? The only alternative source of knowledge to which science educators might turn in seeking answers to these questions would be the activities of professional scientists. Such knowledge is by no means irrelevant. But surely what we know or might come to know about the nature of children's thinking and its development—again, both individually and socially—is at least as important. It is knowledge that I would claim stands to inform both the ends and the means of science education. In the remainder of this article, I do not undertake to provide an exhaustive review of a growing post-Piagetian research literature on the development of scientific thinking. Instead, my goal is only to highlight several of its major dimensions—in particular, those that inform the science education agenda that Metz has advocated. In so doing, I aim to identify a relation between developmental psychology and science education centered around guideposts rather than constraints. These guideposts, highlighting the developmental course of the cognitive and social-cognitive competencies likely to undergo change during the years students are exposed to science instruction, do not tell educators what to do. Yet they stand to positively inform, rather than negatively constrain, the educator's efforts. In the next two sections I briefly discuss five aspects of recent research in developmental psychology relevant to scientific thinking and its development. One is identification of the origins of scientific thinking competencies in the development of children's early theories of mind—the latter a topic of intense recent research activity. A second is recognition of the complexity of scientific thinking development, reflected in the paradoxical findings of impressive early competence and yet equally striking later incompetence. A third is recognition of the multiple strands of cognitive development, including not just the strategic but also the metastrategic, metacognitive, and epistemological. A fourth is the growing use of microgenetic methodology to study process, and a fifth is the connection of scientific thinking to thinking more broadly in domains outside of science. The Development of Scientific Thinking Somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5 years, children acquire the understanding that statements are expressions of someone's belief (Olson & Astington, 1993). As such, they are subject to verification and potentially disconfirmable (Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990). Prior to attainment of this insight, the significance of which rivals other milestones in cognitive development, the universe of assertions that people make remains descriptive of and isomorphic to an external reality. An account of an event differs from the event itself only in that one exists on a representational plane while the other is perceived directly. The world is a simple one in which things happen and we can tell about them; there are no inaccurate renderings of events. 143 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net at Lanzhou University on July 28, 2011
Kuhn The understanding of assertions as belief states emanating from, and therefore connected to, the human activity of knowing marks an early and foundational achievement in the development of epistemological understanding. This understanding, which will evolve in certain predictable directions as the child develops into adolescence and adulthood, has a critical role to play in science education. Understanding assertions as belief states carries the implication that they could be false. Accordingly, assertions are subject to disconfirmation by evidence—the same potential for disconfirmation that is a hallmark of science. From this simple beginning, children gradually develop skill in coordinating their own and others' assertions with evidence (Bullock & Ziegler, in press; Dunbar & Klahr, 1989; Klahr, Fay, & Dunbar, 1993; Kuhn, 1989; Kuhn, Amsel, & O'Loughlin, 1988; Kuhn, Garcia-Mila, Zohar, & Andersen, 1995; Kuhn, Schauble, & Garcia-Mila, 1992; Ruffman, Perner, Olson, & Doherty, 1993; Schauble, 1990, 1996; Sodian, Zaitchik, & Carey, 1991). Yet, into and through adolescence and adulthood, the difficulties individuals continue to have in bringing new evidence to bear on existing beliefs have been well documented (Klahr et al., 1993; Kuhn et al, 1995; Schauble, 1990, 1996; Schauble & Glaser, 1990). The competencies involved in coordinating theories and evidence can be conceptualized as falling into three broad categories: (a) strategic competencies needed to understand the bearing that particular theories and evidence have on one another, (b) metastrategic competencies needed to apply and monitor these inference strategies in consistent and task-appropriate ways, and (c) metacognitive competencies to reflect on one's own theories and the bases for believing them (Kuhn et al., 1995). The latter two categories involve the "second-order thought" that Metz, following Piaget, identifies as a cognitive weakness of children. In a series of studies (Kuhn et al., 1995; Kuhn et al., 1992), we have followed school-aged children, adolescents, and adults over a period of weeks as they engaged in scientific investigation of a database that provided evidence relevant to their existing theories in domains of physical and social science. In more recent work, we have extended this paradigm to individuals working together. Although improvement is evident with age as well as over the period of observation, participants in our research commonly show weaknesses in all three of the dimensions indicated above. They show strategic weakness in not accessing the data that would enable them to draw definitive conclusions, and they often draw conclusions for which they lack the necessary evidence. Metastrategic weakness is reflected in inconsistent application of strategies, with the same inference strategy applied in one case to support a favored conclusion but withheld in another case when the conclusion conflicts with theoretical belief. Finally, metacognitive competencies are essential to the task our participants engaged in, since it required justifying assertions by identifying and maintaining knowledge of their sources (the bases for claiming them to be true). Paralleling young children who have been found to have difficulty in maintaining awareness of the source of knowledge they have just acquired (Gopnik & Graf, 1988), older as well as younger participants in our studies blurred the metacognitive distinction between theory-based justification (why this claim makes sense and ought to be true) and evidence-based justification (bearing on whether it is in fact true). Individuals who offer theory-based justifications in response to questions soliciting evidence for their assertions have limited awareness of why they believe what 144 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net at Lanzhou University on July 28, 2011
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they do. Indeed, some of our participants appeared to have only dim awareness of their assertions as belief states subject to disconfirmation. When disconfirming evidence accumulated, these individuals frequently did not identify it as discrepant with their theory, but rather marshaled fragments of this evidence as supporting the theory, using them to illustrate (rather than provide evidence for) a state of affairs they never considered as possibly not true. Many continued to describe the data as supportive of their theories after weeks of investigation of a database that in fact provided no support for these theories. These weaknesses are striking, especially in view of the early competence revealed in other research. In addition to the metacognitive recognition of false belief noted earlier and numerous strategic capabilities that appear by school age, the rich complexity of young children's theoretical knowledge has been well documented (Samarapungavan, 1992; Wellman & Gelman, 1992, in press). Children clearly construct and use a wide array of theories as a means of understanding their worlds. In a strategic vein, as long as the situation is simple and their own beliefs are not challenged, school-aged children can identify correspondences between certain patterns of evidence and theories (Ruffman et al., 1993), even when the theory has been explicitly presented as false (and despite the weakness noted above in firmly distinguishing theory and evidence). Put in different terms, the child can draw appropriate inferences from contrary-to-fact propositions (an ability Piaget tied to the emergence of formal operations). Children of similar age can choose a determinate versus indeterminate test as a means of verifying a proposition (Pieraut-Le Bonniec, 1980; Sodian et al., 1991) and draw inferences of causality from covariation (Ruffman et al., 1993; Shultz & Mendelson, 1975). (See Kuhn et al., 1995, for fuller discussion of this research.) Yet, as the data cited earlier have made clear, children are far from effective or efficient scientists—a fact that Metz acknowledges, but only barely, given her focus on marshaling evidence against a developmental constraints model. These data also demonstrate developmental change in several key respects—centered around increasing control of the process of theory-evidence coordination—and stand as counterevidence to earlier claims (Brewer & Samarapungavan, 1991; Carey, 1985) that there exists no evidence of fundamental differences in the thinking of immature, intuitive scientists and the most sophisticated scientific thinking engaged in by professional scientists. But these data do not dictate a constraints model that would deem it fruitless to engage children in scientific inquiry. Far from it, they underscore the importance of such activities, as essential practice in coordinating theories and evidence. They also underscore the need for a process approach capable of tracing how development occurs. Research confined to demonstrations of early competence (which Metz focuses on in her review) provides at best an incomplete picture. Yes, children show some clear early competencies in scientific investigation that provide essential foundations for further development, but it is equally important to know what skills they do not yet have and how these evolve and can be supported. Developmental psychologists have come to understand this in recent years, following a wave of studies dedicated to demonstrating early competence in various domains ranging from infants' object concept (Haith & Benson, in press) to the scientific reasoning skills of concern here. It is now largely recognized that such studies serve as a beginning, but certainly not an end, since they 145 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net at Lanzhou University on July 28, 2011
Kuhn leave many of the most crucial questions unanswered—questions of the process by means of which this early competence arose and the process and directions of its future development. The growing popularity of the microgenetic method (Kuhn, 1995; Kuhn & Phelps, 1982; Siegler & Crowley, 1991) signals the new availability of such process-oriented data. By following individuals over a period of months (rather than the years customary in longitudinal designs) in which they are engaged in frequent exercise of the strategies of interest, we are likely to observe developmental change and be in a position to closely examine its nature. Use of the method has made clear the complexity of cognitive development. It involves far more than a singular transition from A to B. Instead, microgenetic studies consistently show that children (and adults) have a repertory of more and less adequate strategies that they apply variably even when the task remains constant; development entails gradual shifts in the distribution of usage of these strategies and a gradual evolution toward more frequent use of better strategies (and, equally importantly, less frequent use of inferior ones). Moreover, in the realm of scientific thinking, a major conclusion to come from our own microgenetic investigations of scientific inquiry is the need to focus on more than simply strategic development. Equally important are not only the metastrategic and metacognitive, which have already been discussed, but also developing epistemological understanding, which strongly influences what sense children are making of the scientific inquiry in which they engage and the subsequent uses they are likely to put it to. In the epistemological domain, a number of researchers (Chandler, Boyes, & Ball, 1990; King & Kitchener, 1994; Kuhn, 1991; Perry, 1970; see Moshman, in press, for a review) have documented a progression from (a) an absolutist appeal to certain knowledge to (b) a relativist surrender to total subjectivity and finally to (c) an evaluative epistemological understanding in which reasoned judgment and argument are recognized and valued in the face of uncertainty. These epistemological stances are wide ranging in their manifestations. Parallel forms are observable, for example, in domains as diverse as science (Carey & Smith, 1993) and history (Kuhn, Weinstock, & Flaton, 1994). Indeed, all disciplines have an epistemological dimension, and students' comprehension within a discipline will be influenced by their understanding of its epistemological underpinnings (Baron, 1993). Carey and Smith (1993) describe students' limited epistemological understanding of the nature of the scientific enterprise, with most junior high school students seeing the process of professional science as an accumulation of factual knowledge derived from unbiased observation and experimentation and unconnected to any body of theory that might play a role in the process. What meaning or personal relevance, we might ask, can scientific inquiry be expected to have for such students? Science and Everyday Life Epistemological understanding thus brings us to the question of what role science and science education are to play in people's lives. Science educators really cannot pursue their educational agendas—nor can we reflect on these agendas—without engaging this question as a central one. Not only psychologists but scientists and educators of the stature of Einstein (1954) and Dewey (1931) 146 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net at Lanzhou University on July 28, 2011
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have recognized the need to link scientific thinking to thinking more broadly. And it is here, perhaps, that we might seek a broader justification for Metz's advocacy of scientific inquiry as an educational activity. Both Dewey and Piaget recognized the "little scientist" in the avid curiosity and desire for mastery that young children bring to understanding their world, and they both struggled to reconcile this image with their other theoretical views regarding the developmental course beyond early childhood (Cahan, 1992; Kuhn, 1992). Dewey (1933) wrote of the need for "the transformation of more or less casual curiosity and sporadic suggestion into attitudes of alert, cautious, and thorough inquiry" ( p. 181). But such attitudes of course extend far beyond science in their applicability and significance, and Dewey (1931) recognized the broad educational significance of this process: If scientific thought is not something esoteric but is a realization of the most effective operation of intelligence, it should be axiomatic that the development of scientific attitudes of thought, observation, and inquiry is the chief business of study and learning, (p. 60) In other words, Dewey recognized that scientific thinking has significance and must be cultivated and nurtured in contexts that extend far beyond science. In my own work (Kuhn, 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1996), I have looked for the connections between scientific thinking and argumentive thinking more broadly conceived. Both scientific and everyday theories are possible states of affairs that are subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by evidence, and the challenges that individuals encounter in scientific inquiry are deeply connected to those they encounter in informal argumentive reasoning. In both of these contexts, people must be able to distance themselves from their own beliefs to a sufficient degree to be able to evaluate them in a framework of alternatives that compete with them and evidence that bears on them. In sum, although the strategic, metastrategic, and metacognitive skills and the epistemological understanding described earlier are critical to scientific thinking, they are not particular to it (Kuhn, 1996). What we refer to as scientific thinking is fundamental to thinking more broadly conceived and hence to the educational enterprise, also broadly conceived. In conceptualizing how to educate children toward these ends, we must, as Carey and Smith (1993) stress, be especially sensitive to their epistemological aspect. Children must recognize and appreciate the values that make science worth doing. If they don't, there is little else that is important for them to learn about it. Moving Forward: A Psychologically Informed Agenda for Science Education The message that one might take away from Metz's article is that science educators have tried developmental psychology and it has failed them. For a long time, they were gullible, taken in by a presumedly authoritative body of work that they were encouraged to believe could provide the knowledge of children's mental capabilities needed to design appropriate science instruction. Educators can look, perhaps, to "real" science for direction and inspiration in shaping science education, but in the future they will not be so quick to put their faith in what psychological research has to offer. 147 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net at Lanzhou University on July 28, 2011
Kuhn To draw these conclusions, I believe, would be lamentable. During the past couple of decades, on which Metz's article focuses, developmental psychology has itself been evolving in significant respects, particularly in topic areas critical to science educators, such as reasoning and problem solving and the interface between domain-specific knowledge and cross-domain strategies. It is not, nor has it been, a static body of knowledge that science educators might choose either to apply to their concerns or to reject. From a focus on static logical structures underlying thought to the use of dynamic methods to study process, the recognition of the importance of metastrategic, metacognitive, and epistemological dimensions of competence and, perhaps most important, the connection of scientific thinking to thinking more broadly conceived represent some of the broad dimensions of progress. Moreover, in contrast to an earlier compartmentalization of "basic" and "applied" concerns, a majority of developmental psychologists are now enthused about applying their efforts to understanding children's functioning in real-world contexts, both in and outside of classrooms. They also recognize the potential for these observations to feed back to and enrich their theories. The efforts of science educators and cognitive development researchers clearly need to inform one another, in a partnership that now appears especially promising. References Baron, J. (1993). Why teach thinking? Applied Psychology, 42(3), 191-237. Brewer, W., & Samarapungavan, A. (1991). Children's theories vs. scientific theories: Differences in reasoning or differences in knowledge? In R. Hoffman & D. Palermo (Eds.), Cognition and the symbolic processes (pp. 209-232). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Bullock, M., & Ziegler, A. (in press). Scientific reasoning: Developmental and individual differences. In F. Weinert & W. Schneider (Eds.), Individual development from 3 to 12: Findings from the Munich Longitudinal Study. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cahan, D. (1992). John Dewey and human development. Developmental Psychology, 28, 205-214. Carey, S. (1985). Are children fundamentally different kinds of thinkers and learners than adults? In S. Chipman, J. Segal, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills (Vol. 2, pp. 485-518). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Carey, S., & Smith, C. (1993). On understanding the nature of scientific knowledge. Educational Psychologist, 28, 235-251. Chandler, M., Boyes, M., & Ball, L. (1990). Relativism and stations of epistemic doubt. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 50, 370-395. Dewey, J. (1931). Science and society. In J. Boydston (Ed.), Later works ofJohn Dewey (Vol. 6, pp. 49-63). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1933). The process and product of reflective activity: Psychological process and logical forms. In J. Boydston (Ed.), Later works ofJohn Dewey (Vol. 8, pp. 171186). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dunbar, K., & Klahr, D. (1989). Developmental differences in scientific discovery strategies. In D. Klahr & K. Kotovsky (Eds.), Complex information processing: The impact of Herbert A. Simon (Proceedings of the 21st Carnegie-Mellon Symposium on Cognition) (pp. 109-144). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Einstein, A. (1954). Ideas and opinions. New York: Crown. Gopnik, A., & Graf, P. (1988). Knowing how you know: Young children's ability to identify and remember the sources of their beliefs. Child Development, 59, 1366— 1371. 148 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net at Lanzhou University on July 28, 2011
Developmental Psychology and Science Education Haith, M , & Benson, J. (in press). Infant cognition. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, language, and perception (5th ed.). New York: Wiley. King, P., & Kitchener, K. (1994). Developing reflective judgment: Understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Klahr, D., Fay, A., & Dunbar, K. (1993). Heuristics for scientific experimentation: A developmental study. Cognitive Psychology, 25, 111-146. Kuhn, D. (1989). Children and adults as intuitive scientists. Psychological Review, 96, 674-689. Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, D. (1992). Piaget's child as scientist. In H. Beilin & P. Pufall (Eds.), Piaget: Prospects and possibilities (pp. 185-208). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Kuhn, D. (1993a). Connecting scientific and informal reasoning. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 59(1), 74-103. Kuhn, D. (1993b). Science as argument: Implications for teaching and learning scientific thinking. Science Education, 77(3), 319-337. Kuhn, D. (1995). Microgenetic study of change: What has it told us? Psychological Science, 6, 133-139. Kuhn, D. (1996). Is good thinking scientific thinking? In D. Olson (Ed.), Modes of thought: Explorations in culture and cognition (pp. 261-281). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, D., Amsel, G., & O'Loughlin, M. (1988). The development of scientific thinking skills. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Kuhn, D., Garcia-Mila, M , Zohar, A., & Andersen, C. (1995). Strategies of knowledge acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 60(4, Serial No. 245). Kuhn, D., & Phelps, E. (1982). The development of problem-solving strategies. In H. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 17, pp. 1^44). New York: Academic Press. Kuhn, D., Schauble, L., & Garcia-Mila, M. (1992). Cross-domain development of scientific reasoning.Cognition and Instruction, 9(4), 285-327. Kuhn, D., Weinstock, M., & Flaton, R. (1994). Historical reasoning as theory-evidence coordination. In M. Carretero & J. Voss (Eds.), Cognitive and instructional processes in history and the social sciences (pp. 377^401). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Metz, K. (1995). Reassessment of developmental constraints on children's science instruction. Review of Educational Research, 65, 93-127. Moshman, D. (in press). Cognitive development beyond childhood. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language (5th ed.). New York: Wiley. Olson, D., & Astington, J. (1993). Thinking about thinking: Learning how to take statements and hold beliefs. Educational Psychologist, 28(1), 7-23. Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Perry, W. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Pieraut-Le Bonniec, G. (1980). The development of modal reasoning. New York: Academic Press. Ruffman, T., Perner, J., Olson, D., & Doherty, M. (1993). Reflecting on scientific thinking: Children's understanding of the hypothesis-evidence relation. Child Development, 64, 1617-1636. Samarapungavan, A. (1992). Children's judgments in theory choice tasks: Scientific 149
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Kuhn rationality in childhood. Cognition, 45, 1-32. Schauble, L. (1990). Belief revision in children: The role of prior knowledge and strategies for generating evidence. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 49, 31-57. Schauble, L. (1996). The development of scientific reasoning in knowledge-rich contexts. Developmental Psychology, 32, 102-119. Schauble, L., & Glaser, R. (1990). Scientific thinking in children and adults. In D. Kuhn (Ed.), Developmental perspectives on teaching and learning thinking skills (pp. 9 27). Basel, Switzerland: Karger. Schraw, G., & Moshman, D. (1995). Metacognitive theories. Educational Psychology Review, 7, 351-371. Shultz, T., & Mendelson, R. (1975). The use of covariation as a principle of causal analysis. Child Development, 46, 394-399. Siegler, R., & Crowley, K. (1991). The microgenetic method: A direct means for studying cognitive development. American Psychologist, 46(6), 606-620. Sodian, B., Zaitchik, D., & Carey, S. (1991). Young children's differentiation of hypothetical beliefs from evidence. Child Development, 62, 753-766. Wellman, H. (1990). The child's theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wellman, H., & Gelman, S. (1992). Cognitive development: Foundational theories of core domains. Annual Review of Psychology, 43, 337-375. Wellman, H., & Gelman, S. (in press). Knowledge acquisition in foundational domains. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language (5th ed.). New York: Wiley. Author DEANNA KUHN is Professor of Psychology and Education, Box 119, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027;
[email protected]. She specializes in cognitive development and education. Received December 11, 1995 Revision received October 28, 1996 Accepted November 13, 1996
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