The Development of Scientific Reasoning in Knowledge-Rich Contexts

In this study of the development of scientific reasoning, 10 5th-6th-grade children (5 boys and 5 girls) and 10 noncollege adults conducted experiments over 6 half-hour sessions to explore the causal structure of 2 physical science domains. Feedback in these systems, though relevant to discriminating among hypotheses, was noisy as a result of varying effect sizes and measurement error. After 2 hr on each task, both age groups demonstrated changes in their understanding of the content and in their strategies for generating and interpreting evidence. In general, the adults outperformed the children. Neither valid strategies nor correct beliefs alone was sufficient to guarantee success, suggesting that regarding experimentation either as domain-general induction or as domain-specific learning may oversimplify its complexity.