Development and Change of Young Children's Misconceptions about Physics

本研究的目的是探讨幼儿的发展和变化。对物理学的误解。PI挑战的误解，反映稳定的，先验的概念，其中一些必须克服，以达到一个复杂的正式理解领域的共同解释。一个共同的建议是让孩子参与进来？首先是他们的误解，然后向他们提供不证实的证据。不幸的是，孩子们对改变他们的错误信念表现出惊人的抵抗力，自发地出现正确的信念是罕见的。在这项建议中，PI借鉴了另一套基本认知的发现，表明一个孩子？的误解，而不是成为孩子稳定的一部分？的知识，是试图组织和理解儿童行为的直接背景。这些发现意味着，一个成功的教学干预可以首先为儿童提供一个复杂的组织原则，而不是让他们自己想出一个。然而，这种替代教学方法的有效性尚未得到明确的测试。拟议的项目将涉及14个随机和对照实验，从调查儿童的性质和发展？的倾向，组织件的信息，以那些测试的干预措施的有效性，根据这些原则，与小学儿童。

The goal of the proposed research is to explore the development and change of young children?s misconceptions about physics. The PI challenges the common interpretation of misconceptions as reflecting stable, a priori concepts, some of which must be overcome in order to come to a to sophisticated formal understanding in the domain. A common recommendation is to engage children?s misconceptions first, and then to provide them with disconfirming evidence. Unfortunately, children show a surprising resistance to changing their mistaken beliefs, and spontaneous emergence of correct beliefs is rare. In this proposal, the PI draws on another set of findings in basic cognition indicating that a child?s misconceptions, rather than being a stable part of the child?s knowledge, are an attempt to organize and make sense of the immediate context in which the child acts. These findings imply that a successful teaching intervention could provide children with a sophisticated organizing principle first, rather than letting them come up with one on their own. However, the effectiveness of such an alternative teaching approach has not been tested explicitly. The proposed project will involve 14 randomized and controlled experiments ranging from those investigating the nature and development of children?s tendency to organize pieces of information to those testing the effectiveness of an intervention, based on these principles, with elementary school children.