Of Blickets, Butterflies, and Baby Dinosaurs: Children's Diagnostic Reasoning Across Domains

Developmental Trajectories in Diagnostic Reasoning: Understanding Data Are Confounded Develops Independently of Choosing Informative Interventions to Resolve Confounded Data

Two facets of diagnostic reasoning related to scientific thinking are recognizing the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence and selecting appropriate interventions that could provide learners the evidence necessary to make an appropriate causal conclusion (i.e., the control-of-variables strategy). The present study investigates both these abilities in 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 57). We found both competence and developmental progress in the capacity to recognize that evidence is confounded. Similarly, children performed above chance in some tasks testing for the selection of a controlled test of a hypothesis. However, these capacities were unrelated, suggesting that preschoolers' nascent understanding of the control-of-variables strategy may not be driven by a metacognitive understanding that confounded evidence does not support a unique causal conclusion, and requires further investigation.

Rethinking the "gap": Self-directed learning in cognitive development and scientific reasoning

To improve upon their current knowledge, learners must be able to generate informative data and accurately evaluate this evidence. However, there is substantial disagreement regarding self-directed learners' competence in these behaviors. Researchers in cognitive development have suggested that learners are "intuitive scientists," generating informative actions and rationally coordinating their current observations and prior beliefs from an early age. Conversely, researchers in scientific reasoning report that learners struggle with experimentation and often fail to reach appropriate conclusions from evidence, even as adults. According to the prevailing narrative, these inconsistent findings must be "bridged" to explain the gap between learners' successes and failures. Here, we advocate for an alternative approach. First, we review the research on scientific reasoning and find that there may be less evidence for learners' failures than is typically assumed. Second, we offer a novel interpretation that aims to account for both literatures: we suggest that self-directed learners may be best understood as competent causal reasoners. That is, many seemingly uninformative or irrational behaviors are consistent with the goals of causal learning. This account not only resolves the apparent contradictions in the existing research, but also offers a way forward towards a more accurate and integrated understanding of self-directed learning. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Psychology > Learning Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making.