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，孩子们必须能做两件事。首先，他们必须能够对世界是如何运行的进行推理，以便他们能够理解他们遇到的因果系统，例如是什么导致了地震。其次，孩子们必须能够思考自己的知识和学习过程，这样他们才会知道是否以及如何改变他们对因果系统的信念。这个项目试图(1)发现信念修正能力是如何在小学早期发展起来的，(2)探索这种能力如何与儿童意识到自己的学习有关，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。研究团队包括宾夕法尼亚大学和布朗大学的开发实验室，以及费城自然科学学院和普罗维登斯儿童博物馆的非正式STEM学习伙伴。该项目由EHR核心研究(ECR)计划资助，该计划资助基础研究，旨在了解、构建理论以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科学难题的反应。第一系列实验是以实验室为基础的，改变了儿童观察的信息和他们可以采取的探索性行动的类型。孩子们也接受了采访，以了解他们对科学和学习的看法。这项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。它还讨论了儿童的信念修正能力在抽象因果系统和情景因果系统中可能存在的差异。这项工作还考察了儿童何时能够在反证面前明确地修改他们的信念，将他们的科学思维能力与他们发展中的元认知能力联系起来。第二个系列实验观察和记录了孩子们在博物馆展品中的探索和互动。家长和孩子接受了采访，并被要求对他们探索博物馆的视频剪辑发表评论。这使得研究人员能够检验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。这些发现可以阐明孩子们是如何学习将证据与他们的信念相结合的，这可以为围绕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将儿童培养成健康、独立的思考者，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.