Promoting scientific understanding and conceptual change in young children using explanations and guidance.

Evaluating evidence and restructuring beliefs based on anomalous evidence are fundamental aspects of scientific reasoning. These skills can be challenging for both children and adults, especially in domains where they possess inaccurate prior beliefs that can interfere with the acquisition of correct scientific information (e.g.

The Role of Alternative Theories and Anomalous Evidence in Children's Scientific Belief Revision.

Children's naive theories include misconceptions which can interfere with science learning. This research examined the effect of pairing anomalies with alternative theories, and their order of presentation, on children's belief revision. Children believe that heavy objects sink and light ones float.

Prompting Children's Belief Revision About Balance Through Primary and Secondary Sources of Evidence.

Prior evidence has shown that children's understanding of balance proceeds through stages. Children go from a stage where they lack a consistent theory (), to becoming at around age 6 (believing that all objects balance in their geometric center), to at around age 8, when they begin to consider the distribution of objects' mass. In this study we adapted prior testing paradigms to examine 5-year-olds' understanding of balance and compared children's learning about balance from evidence presented through primary sources (a guided activity) or secondary sources (picture books).

Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and thus are more inclined to act according to the moral lessons of the stories. Here we experimentally tested this belief by reading preschoolers a sharing story with either human characters or anthropomorphized animal characters.