Can a Preschooler’s Mistaken Belief Benefit Learning?
Abstract
Young children erroneously believe that differences either in mass alone or in volume alone can predict differences in sinking speed. The current study was an attempt to teach preschool children that neither mass nor volume alone is predictive for sinking speed. Instead, it is the average density of an object that can predict differences in sinking speed. Twenty-four 4-to 6-year-olds participated. In an initial phase, children’s mistaken beliefs about the effects of mass and volume on sinking speed were called to their minds. Then they were presented with demonstrations of sinking objects that disconfirmed these mistaken beliefs. The findings show that preschool children can replace mistaken beliefs and learn that two dimensions, originally thought of as being relevant, are indeed irrelevant. Children who did not perform correctly demonstrated a mass bias. The results also shed light on the origins of this bias.
References
Aslin, R. N. , Saffran, J. R. , Newport, E. L. (1998). Computation of conditional aprobability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 9, 321– 324Carey, S. (1991). Knowledge acquisition: Enrichment or conceptual change? . In S. Carey & S. Gelman (Eds.), The epigenisis of mind: Essays in biology and cognition (pp. 257-292). Hillsdale, NJ: ErlbaumFiser, J. , Aslin, R. N. (2001). Unsupervised statistical learning of higher-order spatial structures from visual scenes. Psychological Science, 12, 499– 504Fiser, J. , Aslin, R. N. (2002). Statistical learning of new visual feature combinations by infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 15822– 15826Gómez, R. L. (2002). Variability and detection of invariant structure. Psychological Science, 13(5), 431– 436Gómez, R. L. , Gerken, L . A. (1999). Artificial grammar learning by one-year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge. Cognition, 70, 109– 135Gómez, R. L. , Gerken, L. A. (2000). Artificial language learning and language acquisition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 178– 186Guzzetti, B. J. , Snyder, T. E. , Glass, G. V. , Gammas, W. S. (1993). Promoting conceptual change in science: A comparative meta-analysis of instruction interventions from reading education and science educations. Reading Research Quarterly, 28(2), 117– 159Halford, G. S. , Brown, C. A. , Thompson, R. M. (1986). Children’s concepts of volume and flotation. Developmental Psychology, 22(2), 218– 222Hauser, M. D. , Newport, E. L. , Aslin, R. N. (2001). Segmentation of the speech stream in a nonhuman primate: Statistical learning in cotton top tamarins. Cognition, 78, B53– B64Hewson, M. G. , Hewson, P. W. (1983). The effect of instruction using students’ prior knowledge and conceptual change strategies on science learning. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 20(2), 731– 743Hunt, R. H. , Aslin, R. N. (2001). Statistical learning in a serial reaction time task: Simultaneous extraction of mulitple statistics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 658– 680Inhelder, B. , Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence. New York: Basic BooksKarmiloff-Smith, A. (1984). Children’s problem solving. In M. E. Lamb, A. L. Brown, & B. Rogoff (Eds.), Advances in developmental psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 39-99). Hillsdale, NJ: ErlbaumKarmiloff-Smith, A. , Inhelder, B. (1975). If you want to go ahead, get a theory. Cognition, 3, 95– 212Kloos, H. (2003). Understanding the relations among mass, volume, and density: Children’s sensitivity to logical congruence. Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Tampa, FL, USA.Kloos, H. , Amazeen, E. L. (2002). Perceiving heaviness by dynamic touch: An investigation of the size-weight illusion in preschoolers. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 20, 171– 183Kloos, H. , Amazeen, E. L. (in press). Building blocks of physical knowledge: Can children learn how two dimensions are correlated?.Kloos, H. , Somerville, S. C. (2001). Providing impetus for conceptual change: The effect of organizing the input. Cognitive Development, 16, 737– 759Kohn, A. S. (1993). Preschoolers’ reasoning about density: Will it float?. Child Development, 64, 1637– 1650Kuhn, D. , Amsel, E. D. , O’Loughlin, M. (1988). The development of scientific reasoning skills. New York: Academic.Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University PressPenner, D. E. , Klahr, D. (1996). The interaction of domain-specific knowledge and domain-general discovery strategies: A study with sinking objects. Child Development, 67, 2709– 2727Saffran, J. R. , Aslin, R. N. , Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926– 1928Schauble, L. (1990). Belief revision in children: The role of prior knowledge and strategies for generating evidence. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 49, 31– 57Schauble, L. (1996). The development of scientific reasoning in knowledge-rich contexts. Developmental Psychology, 32, 102– 119Schilling, T. H. , Clifton, R. K. (1998). Nine-month-old infants learn about a physical event in a single session: Implications for infants’ understanding of physical phenomena. Cognitive Development, 13, 165– 184Smith, C. , Carey, S. , Wiser, M. (1985). On differentiation: A case study o the development of the concept of size, weight, and density. Cognition, 21, 177– 237Smith, C. , Snir, J. , Grosslight, L. (1992). Using conceptual models to facilitate the conceptual change - The case of weight-density differentiation. Cognition and Instruction, 9, 221– 283Smith, L. B. , Sera, M. D. (1992). A developmental analysis of the polar structure of dimensions. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 99– 142Sodian, B. , Zaitchik, D. , Carey, S. (1991). Young children’s differentiation of hypothetical beliefs from evidence. Child Development, 62, 753– 766Somerville, S. C. (1974). The pendulum problem: Patterns of performance defining developmental stages. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 44, 266– 281VanOrden, G. C. , Pennington, B. F. , Stone, G. O. (1990). Word identification in reading and the promise of subsymbolic psycholinguistics. Psychological Review, 97, 488– 522Wiser, M. , Amin, T. (2001). “Is heat hot?” - Inducing conceptual change by integrating everyday and scientific perspectives on thermal phenomena. Learning and Instruction, 11, 331– 355