Young children's beliefs about causal systems: Learning about belief revision in the lab and in museums

科学思维中最重要的过程之一是信念修正：根据新证据改变初始假设的能力。为了做到这一点，孩子们必须做两件事。首先，他们必须能够推理世界是如何运作的，这样他们才能理解他们遇到的因果系统，比如地震的原因。第二，孩子们必须能够思考他们自己的知识和学习过程，这样他们就会知道是否以及如何改变他们对因果系统的信念。本研究的目的是：（1）发现小学早期信念修正能力的发展，（2）探索这种能力与儿童自我学习意识的关系，以及（3）描述这两个过程如何与儿童与博物馆展品的互动有关。该研究团队涉及宾夕法尼亚大学和布朗大学的发展实验室以及费城自然科学院和普罗维登斯儿童博物馆的非正式STEM学习合作伙伴。该项目由EHR核心研究（ECR）计划资助，该计划资助基础研究，旨在理解，建立理论解释，并提出干预措施（和创新），以解决STEM兴趣，教育，学习和参与方面的持续挑战。该项目涉及两条研究路线，研究儿童对不同类型的科学谜题的反应。第一系列的实验是基于实验室的，并改变儿童观察到的信息和他们可以采取的探索性行动的类型。孩子们也接受采访，以了解他们如何看待科学和学习。本设计旨在确定不同的证据集和不同的探索性行动如何影响儿童的学习。它还解决了如何儿童的信念修订的能力可能会有所不同的抽象和语境化的因果系统。这一系列的工作还调查了孩子们何时获得了在面对反证时明确修改自己信念的能力，将他们的科学思维能力与他们发展的元认知能力联系起来。第二组实验观察并记录儿童对博物馆展品的探索和互动。家长和孩子们接受采访，并要求他们对博物馆探索的视频剪辑发表评论。这使研究人员能够研究非正式学习环境中自然发生的行为如何影响儿童的学习和对学习的看法。研究结果可以阐明儿童如何学会将证据与他们的信念相结合，这可以为科学教学的教育政策和实践提供信息。这些研究还可以促进研究人员和博物馆从业人员了解博物馆环境如何促进儿童成长为健康，独立的思想家，以及如何支持照顾者帮助儿童学习的努力。

One of the most important processes in scientific thinking is belief revision: the ability to change an initial hypothesis in light of new evidence. In order to do this, children must be able to do two things. First, they must be able to reason about how the world works so that they can understand the causal systems they encounter, such as what causes earthquakes. Second, children must be able to think about their own knowledge and the process of learning so that they will know whether and how to change their beliefs about causal systems. This project seeks to (1) discover how the capacity for belief revision develops in the early elementary-school years, (2) explore how this capacity relates to children's awareness of their own learning, and (3) describe how both of these processes relate to children's interactions with museum exhibits. The research team involves developmental laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University and informal STEM learning partners at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Providence Children's Museum. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program which funds fundamental research that seeks to understand, build theory to explain, and suggest interventions (and innovations) to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation.The project involves two lines of research, which study children's responses to different kinds of science puzzles. The first series of experiments are lab-based and vary the information that children observe and the types of exploratory actions that they can take. Children are also interviewed to find out how they think about science and learning. This design is intended to determine how different sets of evidence and different exploratory actions affect children's learning. It also addresses how children's abilities for belief revision may differ between abstract and contextualized causal systems. This line of work additionally investigates when children gain the capacity to revise their beliefs explicitly in the face of counterevidence, linking their scientific thinking capacities to their developing metacognitive abilities. The second series of experiments observes and records children's explorations of and interactions in museum exhibits. Parents and children are interviewed and asked to comment on video clips of their museum explorations. This allows the researchers to examine how naturally occurring behavior in informal learning settings affects children's learning and views about learning. Findings can illuminate how children learn to integrate evidence with their beliefs, which can inform educational policies and practices around the teaching of science. These studies can also advance researchers and museum practitioners' understanding of how museum environments foster children's growth into healthy, independent thinkers and how to support caregivers' efforts to assist children's learning.