Experience and the Development of Folk Biological Reasoning

该项目研究了与植物和动物的非正式经历如何增强5至10岁儿童的生物推理能力。对民间生物学的研究——常识，对植物和动物的日常理解——表明，到5岁时，孩子们已经组织了非正式获得的生物学知识，并用它来推理自然界。此外，在农村地区长大的孩子可能对相对完整的自然生态系统有更多的非正式经验，他们表现出相对复杂的民间生物推理。然而，研究尚未确定农村与城市环境相关的具体经历，这些经历会导致这些儿童的认知表现差异。该项目将通过比较农村和城市儿童与自然的不同经历如何导致他们对自然的看法不同，来研究经验如何影响民间生物推理的发展。该项目主要针对波士顿城市学校和马萨诸塞州西部农村学校的儿童。孩子们和他们的父母将接受采访，了解他们如何度过他们的时间，以及他们经常参加哪些与自然有关的活动。孩子们还将接受结构化访谈和实验任务，以评估民间生物思维的不同方面。这些测量之间的关系有望揭示不同的环境如何导致思维的差异，以及经验和认知发展之间更普遍的联系。结果将推进我们对具体经验差异如何导致思维差异的了解，并提供一幅精确的图景，说明哪种经验会导致更复杂的民间生物推理。这项研究可以作为在其他环境中成长的儿童发展经验的基础，这些经验将支持他们在生物学领域的概念发展。通过阐明课堂外的活动如何影响与科学教育相关的知识，以及通过阐明儿童带入课堂的非正式生物学理解，这些发现对教育者具有潜在的价值。

This project examines how informal experiences with plants and animals may enhance the development of biological reasoning in children between the ages of 5 and 10. Research on folk biology -- commonsense, everyday understanding of plants and animals -- suggests that by age 5 children already organize informally-acquired biological knowledge and use it to reason about the natural world. Further, children growing up in rural areas, who presumably have more informal experience with relatively intact natural ecosystems, exhibit relatively sophisticated folk biological reasoning. However, research has yet to identify specific experiences associated with rural versus urban environments that contribute to differences in cognitive performance among these children. This project will investigate how experience influences the development of folk biological reasoning by comparing how the different experiences with nature available to rural and urban children may lead to differences in how they think about nature. The project focuses on children from urban schools in Boston and from rural schools in WesternMassachusetts. Children and their parents will be interviewed about how they spend their time and what kinds of nature-related activities they regularly engage in. Children will also be given structured interviews and experimental tasks designed to assess different aspects of folk biological thinking. Relations among these measures promise to shed light on how different environments lead to differences in thinking, and more general links between experience and cognitive developmentResults will advance what we know about how specific differences in experience lead to differences in thinking, and provide a picture of precisely which kinds of experiences lead to more sophisticated folk biological reasoning. This research may serve as the basis for developing experiences for children growing up in other environments that will support their conceptual development in the area of biology. Findings are potentially valuable to educators by clarifying how activities outside of the classroom may impact knowledge relevant to science education, and by elucidating the informal biological understanding that children bring to the classroom.