Abstract
Children's thinking about prenatal development requires reasoning about change that cannot be observed directly. How do children gain knowledge about this topic? Do children have mental models or is their knowledge fragmented? In Experiment 1, results of a forced-choice questionnaire about prenatal development (6- to 13-year-olds; N = 317) indicated that children do have a variety of coherent, grade-related, theories about early shape of the fetus, but not about bodily functions. Coherence of the mental models was enhanced by a preceding generative task. Children's mental models were in agreement with reasoning about natural transformations (Rosengren et al., 1991) and constraints in representational flexibility (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). In Experiment 2, an open-question interview was administered (6- to 12-year-old children; N = 38). The interview resulted in grade-unrelated, incoherent responses. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of naïve biology and to the effects of different methodologies being used in the area of mental models.
Highlights
Children gain a great deal of knowledge about the world around them during childhood (Carey, 1985)
The first model, the growth model, which was most frequently found in the early grades, assumes that the early fetus is smaller than a newborn baby
The third model, the different model, which was dominant in the highest grades, assumes that the early fetus looks very different from a newborn baby
Summary
Children gain a great deal of knowledge about the world around them during childhood (Carey, 1985). To integrate some of this knowledge into a coherent, not necessarily scientifically correct, concept of gravity is an extremely difficult task. A fundamental question regarding each knowledge domain is whether children form theory-like, coherent and internally consistent ideas, i.e., mental models (Vosniadou and Brewer, 1992; Straatemeier et al, 2008), or whether their knowledge about the topic remains fragmented until they learn a scientific concept (Vosniadou et al, 2004; diSessa, 2008). That is, following Straatemeier et al we take as a defining characteristic of a mental model a coherent and internally consistent idea, leading to a coherent pattern of responses to a relevant set of questions. To gain a better understanding of knowledge development in general, it is important to gain a better understanding of knowledge development for specific domains
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