CAREER: Learning About Complex Causality in the Classroom

处理世界上最紧迫的问题需要理解因果复杂性并对其进行推理的能力。例如，理解生态系统和全球变暖等主题涉及对不明显的原因、空间差距、时间延迟、循环因果关系和分布式因果关系的推理，其中一个人的行动的机构/意图与紧急结果的机构/意图处于不同的水平。这项建议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，儿童理解复杂的因果概念的能力比以前的研究表明的更大。然而，矛盾的是，学生对科学的误解与学生难以对复杂的因果关系进行推理有关。这项研究将探索当提供支持三种类型的推理的活动和材料时，儿童如何学习推理：分布式因果关系、概率因果关系和远距离行动。通过在学年的多个时间点对K-6年级(微遗传学阶段)的少量学生进行近距离访谈并拍摄下来，这项研究将描述不同年龄的儿童的推理能力，以及它如何随着时间的推移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干预措施。在该项目的最后一年，将利用所学到的关于儿童推理以及如何支持它的知识，在更多的教室中设计和测试生态系统和全球变暖课程单元。

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.