Collaborative Research: How Recognizing Gaps in Explanations Influences Children's Interest in Learning

ECR(教育和人力资源核心研究)计划强调STEM教育的基础研究，这将产生该领域的基础知识。生物学这个复杂领域的因果路径对儿童来说并不总是显而易见的，它们的解释往往包含许多误解和理解上的差距。这一项目将增加关于儿童对信息差距的认识如何影响在正式和非正式学习环境中随后的学习兴趣的有限研究主体。该项目将考察接受或产生解释在多大程度上(如果有的话)会在多大程度上激发儿童未来的学习动机，具体目标有三：(1)考察首先认识到解释存在重大差距的儿童是否有兴趣继续学习某一特定主题；(2)探索解释的来源(由自己或他人)如何与认识到信息差距与未来学习之间的联系；以及(3)制定可用于诱导学生认识解释差距的教学策略，衡量这些策略的结果，包括儿童随后批判性评估解释的能力和他们对未来学习的兴趣。概念框架将以社会认知理论、社会文化理论和机械推理为指导。这一结合的理论框架将促进更好地评估哪些过程驱动儿童解释评估-向他人学习的关键部分-以及机械性解释如何成为分析特定领域(先前知识)和关于学习的领域一般知识之间的交互作用的有用透镜。本项目将使用基于实验室的定量方法和基于课堂的教学实验。定量方法包括关于一个模型的多个协变量的协方差分析，该模型将被开发和实施，以解释对科学解释中的信息差距的反应的发展、个体和任务差异。行为测量将包括解释质量的评级和个体差异测量，如自我报告的兴趣、生物学知识和获取新信息的兴趣。根据实验室研究的结果，将为课堂环境开发脚手架，以支持儿童创造性地参与批判性生物解释。上述措施的一部分将用于收集课堂参与者的事后数据。猜想映射将被用来概念化脚手架、中介过程和结果之间的特定联系。课堂录像和观察将被用来确定设计支架在多大程度上导致了假设的中介过程，并最终导致了有效评估和产生生物现象的机械解释的所需学习结果。这些研究的结果将促进对幼儿解释、评价和建构的科学理解，并为支持有效的教育实践提供一套支架。将实验室研究和基于课堂的研究相结合，将导致开发更具生态有效性的方法，以有利于跨学科研究和教育的方式研究和影响学习行为。这项研究的见解将对父母、孩子和教师在正式和非正式的环境中都是有益的。最后，该项目将提供关于创建适合发展的干预措施的见解，以帮助确定某一年龄段的儿童是否可以受益于侧重于识别解释差距的指导，以便激励他们寻找更好的答案。

The ECR (Education and Human Resources Core Research) program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. The complex domain of biology has causal pathways that are not always readily apparent to young children, and their explanations often contain many misconceptions and gaps in understanding. This project will add to a limited body of research on how children's recognition of information gaps influence subsequent interest in learning in formal and informal learning settings. The project will examine to what extent, if any, receiving or producing explanations motivates children's future learning, with three specific goals: (1) to examine whether children who first recognize that an explanation has significant gaps are interested in engaging in further learning of a particular topic; (2) to explore how the source of the explanation (by self or others) relates to the link between recognizing information gaps and future learning; and (3) to develop instructional strategies that can be used to induce students' recognition of explanatory gaps, measuring outcomes for these strategies, including children's subsequent ability to critically evaluate explanations and their interest in future learning. The conceptual framework will be guided by the social-cognitive theory, sociocultural theory, and mechanistic reasoning. This combined theoretical framing will promote a better assessment of which processes drive children's explanation evaluation - a crucial part of learning from others - and how mechanistic explanations can be useful lenses for analyzing the interactions of domain-specific (prior knowledge) and domain-general knowledge about learning.This project will use laboratory-based quantitative methods and classroom-based teaching experiments. The quantitative methods include ANCOVAs of multiple covariates about a model that will be developed and implemented to explain developmental, individual, and task differences in responses to information gaps in scientific explanations. Behavioral measures will include ratings of explanation quality and individual difference measures, such as self-reported interest, biological knowledge, and interest in acquiring new information. Based on results from laboratory studies, scaffolds will be developed for classroom contexts to support children's productive engagement in critically evaluating biological explanations. A subset of the above measures will be use to collect pre-post data from classroom participants. Conjecture mapping will be used to conceptualize specific links between scaffolds, mediating processes, and outcomes. Classroom video and observations will be used to determine the extent to which the design scaffolds lead to the hypothesized mediating processes and ultimately the desired learning outcomes of effective evaluation and generation of mechanistic explanations of biological phenomena. Outcomes from these studies will advance scientific understanding of young children's explanation evaluation and construction, as well as provide a suite of scaffolds to support effective education practice. Combining lab and classroom-based research will lead to the development of more ecologically-valid methodologies for studying, and impacting, learning behaviors in ways that are beneficial to interdisciplinary research and education. Insights from the research will be beneficial to parents, children and teachers in both formal and informal settings. Finally, the project will provide insight into creating developmentally-appropriate interventions to help determine whether children of a certain age might benefit from instruction focused on recognizing explanatory gaps in order to motivate them to seek out better answers.