Developmental differences in scientific discovery processes

Abstract

studied the behavior of subjects who were attempting to extend their knowledge about a moderately complex device by proposing hypotheses about how it worked and then trying to determine whether or not the device behaved in accordance with their hypotheses / we use the task to investigate what components of the scientific reasoning process show a developmental course / our goal is to understand how existing knowledge structures determine the initial hypotheses, experiments, and data analysis in a discovery task / we explore the issue of whether there are developmental differences in how the two spaces are searched, and how search in one space affects search in the other review some of the relevant literature on the development of scientific reasoning skills / describe . . . task in detail / summarize two earlier studies using adult subjects / describe the performance of 8- to 11-year-old children on this task on the basis of these three studies we propose a model for scientific reasoning, and then use it as a framework for understanding the development of scientific reasoning strategies