Covariation Judgment: Systematic Rule Use in Middle Childhood

Abstract

SHAKLEE, HARRIET, and PASZEK, DONALD. Covariation Judgment: Systematic Rule Use in Middle Childhood. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 1229-1240. Research in causal reasoning and probability judgment indicates that children may show some simple understanding of event covariations by the early elementary school years. The present experiments use a rule-analysis methodology to investigate covariation judgments of children in this age range. Second-, third-, and fourth-grade children saw pictured information illustrating combinations of alternative event states of 2 potentially related events (e.g., plants healthy or not healthy; plant food present or absent) and were asked to identify the direction of the relationship. With increasing age, children were more likely to make judgments based on the pictured event-state combinations. Most common among these judgment strategies was a comparison of frequencies of the target event with and without the covariate (e.g., number of healthy plants with plant food vs. number of healthy plants without plant food, strategy a vs. b). Experiment 2 was a training study designed to investigate possible origins of this rule. Children's posttest performance showed that simply directing their attention to the frequencies of the 2 relevant event-state frequencies was not sufficient to elicit the use of the rule. Additional explicit instructions to compare the two frequencies did lead to use of the a vs. b rule. It was concluded that this simple covariation judgment rule can be used by children in the early elementary school years.