CAREER: Learning About Complex Causality in the Classroom

职业：在课堂上学习复杂的因果关系

• 批准号: 0845632
• 负责人: Tina Grotzer
• 金额: $ 75.05万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-07-01 至 2015-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0845632&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Learning; About; Complex; Causality

Dealing with the world's most pressing problems requires an ability to understand and reason about causal complexity. For instance, understanding topics such as ecosystems and global warming involves reasoning about non-obvious causes, spatial gaps, temporal delays, cyclic causality, and distributed causality where the agency/intentionality of one's actions is on a different level than those of the emergent outcomes. The focus of this proposal is on how children learn to reason about complex causality and how that reasoning can be stimulated and taught in classrooms. The literature on child development suggests that children are capable of understanding complex causal concepts to a greater extent than earlier research suggested. Yet, paradoxically, students' misconceptions in science have been linked to students' difficulties reasoning about complex causality. This study will explore how children learn to reason when provided with activities and materials that support three types of reasoning: distributed causality, probabilistic causality, and action at a distance. By conducting and videotaping close interviews at multiple points in the school year with small numbers of students in grades K-6 (the microgenetic phase), the study will characterize children's reasoning at different ages and how it shifts over time and with different learning supports. It will consider the contexts of biology, mechanical reasoning, social reasoning, and games. Classroom-level interventions will then be introduced and studied. In the last year of the project, using what was learned about children's reasoning and how to support it, ecosystems and global warming curriculum units will be designed and tested in a larger number of classrooms.

处理世界上最紧迫的问题需要一种理解和推理因果复杂性的能力。例如，理解生态系统和全球变暖等主题涉及对非明显原因、空间差距、时间延迟、循环因果关系和分布因果关系的推理，其中行为的代理/意向性与紧急结果处于不同的水平。该提案的重点是儿童如何学习对复杂的因果关系进行推理，以及如何在课堂上刺激和教授这种推理。关于儿童发展的文献表明，儿童能够理解复杂的因果概念的程度比早期研究表明的要大。然而，矛盾的是，学生对科学的误解与学生对复杂因果关系的推理困难有关。本研究将探讨在提供支持三种推理类型的活动和材料时，儿童如何学习推理：分布因果关系、概率因果关系和远距离行动。通过在学年的多个时间点对少量K-6年级（微遗传阶段）的学生进行近距离访谈和录像，该研究将描述不同年龄儿童的推理能力，以及它如何随着时间和不同的学习支持而变化。它将考虑生物学，机械推理，社会推理和游戏的背景。然后将介绍和研究课堂层面的干预措施。在项目的最后一年，利用所学到的关于儿童推理的知识以及如何支持它，生态系统和全球变暖课程单元将在更多的教室中设计和测试。