The Predictive Value of Children's Understanding of Indeterminacy and Confounding for Later Mastery of the Control-of-Variables Strategy.

Sonja Peteranderl,Peter A Edelsbrunner

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531565

Abstract

Prior research has identified age 9–11 as a critical period for the development of the control-of-variables strategy (CVS). We examine the stability of interindividual differences in children's CVS skills with regard to their precursor skills during this critical developmental period. To this end, we relate two precursor skills of CVS at age 9 to four skills constituting fully developed CVS more than 2 years later, controlling for children's more general cognitive development. Note that N = 170 second- to fourth-graders worked on multiple choice-assessments of their understanding of indeterminacy of evidence and of confounding. We find relations between these two precursor skills and children's CVS skills 2 years later at age 11 in planning, identifying, and interpreting controlled experiments, and in recognizing the inconclusiveness of confounded comparisons (understanding). In accordance with the perspective that both indeterminacy and confounding constitute critical, related yet distinct elements of CVS, both precursor skills contribute to the prediction of later CVS. Together, the two precursor skills can explain 39% of students' later CVS mastery. Overall, the understanding of indeterminacy is a stronger predictor of fully developed CVS than that of confounding. The understanding of confounding, however, is a better predictor of the more difficult CVS sub-skills of understanding the inconclusiveness of confounded comparisons, and of planning a correctly controlled experiment. Importantly, both precursor skills maintain interactive predictive strength when controlling for children's general cognitive abilities and reading comprehension, showing that the developmental dynamics of CVS and its precursor skills cannot be fully ascribed to general cognitive development. We discuss implications of these findings for theories about the development of CVS and broader scientific reasoning.

Highlights

Scientific reasoning, which is typically described as a cyclic process of intentional knowledge-seeking through an empirical research process, encompasses skills such as generating and testing hypotheses, conducting controlled experiments, and the data-based evaluation of these experiments (Klahr, 2000; Kuhn et al, 2000; Wilhelm and Beishuizen, 2003; Zimmerman, 2007).Precursor Skills and CVSRegarding experimentation, one crucial component is the control-of-variables strategy (CVS; Chen and Klahr, 1999)
Do children remain relatively stable from the precursor skills to later mastery of CVS, or do new substantial individual differences emerge during the crucial developmental period? In addition, we examine general cognitive abilities and reading comprehension, in order to test whether the predictive value of the two precursor skills represents specific dynamics that are distinct from children’s more general cognitive development
In order to check that the distinctions between the two precursor skills at the first assessment, and between the four CVS sub-skills at the second assessment were psychometrically valid, we conducted two confirmatory factor analyses

Summary

Introduction

Scientific reasoning, which is typically described as a cyclic process of intentional knowledge-seeking through an empirical research process, encompasses skills such as generating and testing hypotheses, conducting controlled experiments, and the data-based evaluation of these experiments (Klahr, 2000; Kuhn et al, 2000; Wilhelm and Beishuizen, 2003; Zimmerman, 2007).Precursor Skills and CVSRegarding experimentation, one crucial component is the control-of-variables strategy (CVS; Chen and Klahr, 1999). Early developmental research indicated that children cannot develop understanding of CVS before early adolescence (Siegler et al, 1973; Tschirgi, 1980), later research indicated that precursor skills emerge already during childhood (Sodian et al, 1991; Bullock et al, 2009; Piekny and Maehler, 2013; Koerber and Osterhaus, 2019). We define precursor skills as the first emerging skills that build the foundation of more advanced and fully developed CVS. We examine whether and to what extent such precursor skills, in the present case children’s understanding of indeterminacy of evidence and of confounding, can predict their mastery of more fully developed CVS skills 2 years later, and whether they have predictive value beyond children’s general cognitive development

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Conclusion