Development and Change of Young Children's Misconceptions about Physics

本研究旨在探讨青少年儿童S物理误区的发展与变化。PI挑战了对错误概念的普遍解释，认为它反映了稳定的、先验的概念，其中一些概念必须克服，以便在该领域达到复杂的形式理解。一种常见的建议是，首先让孩子们了解S的误解，然后向他们提供不确凿的证据。不幸的是，孩子们对改变他们错误的信念表现出惊人的抵抗力，而正确信念的自发出现是罕见的。在这个建议中，PI引用了基础认知中的另一组发现，表明儿童的S误解，而不是儿童S知识的稳定部分，是试图组织和理解儿童行为所在的直接背景。这些发现表明，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还没有得到明确的测试。拟议的项目将包括14个随机和对照实验，从那些调查儿童的本质和发展的实验-S倾向于组织信息片段，到那些测试基于这些原则的干预对小学生的有效性。

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.