Developmental Origins of Scientific Thinking.doc
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1、JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT, 2000, Volume 1, pp. 113129Copyright 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.Developmental Origins of Scientific ThinkingDeanna KuhnDepartment of PsychologyTeachers College, Columbia UniversitySusan PearsallDepartment of PsychologyTeachers College, Columbia Univer
2、sityIdentifying the developmental origins of scientific thinking, as well as its endpoint, provides an essential framework for understanding its development. The origins of scientific thinking are claimed here to lie in attainments in epistemological under- standing, beginning with the understanding
3、 achieved at about 4 years of age that as- sertions generated by human minds are distinguishable from an external reality against which they can be compared. Despite this achievement, children between 4 and 6 years of age exhibit an epistemological category mistake regarding the source of knowledge.
4、 They confuse a theory making it plausible that an event occurred and evi- dence indicating that the event did occur, as the source of their knowing that the event occurred. Appreciation of this distinction develops rapidly during this age range and reflects increasing mastery of an epistemological
5、understanding we argue to be of foundational status for the development of scientific thinking, defined here as the con- sciously controlled coordination of theory and evidence.Authors of several recent review chapters (Haith & Benson, 1998; Keil, 1998) make the observation that the field of develop
6、mental psychology has not been well served by a focus on identifying competencies at earlier and earlier ages. Such stud- ies reveal little about the developmental processes involved in attainment of theRequests for reprints should be sent to Deanna Kuhn, Box 119, Teachers College, Columbia Univer-
7、sity, New York, NY 10027. E-mail: dk100columbia.edu114KUHN AND PEARSALLcompetency, or about how the competency identified at an early age differs from or evolves into the competency in its more mature forms. Researchers efforts, it is ar- gued, would be more productively focused on understanding dev
8、elopmental pro- cess and the states of “partial accomplishment” (Haith & Benson, 1998) that mark its progress.Studies of partial accomplishment need to be undertaken within a conceptual framework that identifies both developmental origins and endpoints. Scientific thinking, the topic of this article
9、, is problematic in this respect, as neither origins nor endpoint have been clear. The intellectual skills associated with scientific thinking are ones valued in rigorous thinking more broadly (Kuhn, 1996). It is, thus, unclear whether it is the cognitive competencies of the professional scientist(w
10、hich only recently have become a focus of empirical study) or of the mature lay person or intuitive scientist that are to be taken as an endpoint (Klahr & Carver,1995; Kuhn, 1995). A clearly conceptualized endpoint narrows the search for ori- gins and together they define what it is that develops.Ou
11、r objective here is to identify the developmental origins of scientific think- ing. A number of claims have been made regarding early forms of scientific think- ing detectable in young children, a few based on experimental data (Ruffman, Perner, Olson, & Doherty, 1993; Sodian, Zaitchik, & Carey, 199
12、1) and many oth- ers in more educationally oriented literature highlighting young childrens skills in activities such as observation, description, and classification. Our interest in pur- suing the question of developmental origins centers on whether the early child- hood years are characterized by
13、any cognitive achievements specific and central to the development of scientific thinking, possibly to the extent of defining its es- sence. Classification, for example, is a more general cognitive capability with roots evident in infancy (Langer, 1980), and which is clearly necessary for scien- tif
14、ic thinking, but at the same time does not define its essence. Are there, in con- trast, early attainments that represent the rudiments of scientific thinking and provide the foundation for its further development?SCIENTIFIC THINKING AS THE COORDINATION OF THEORY AND EVIDENCEThe conceptualization of
15、 mature scientific thinking that has guided our work is one sufficiently broad to encompass skilled thinking both within and outside of profes- sional science. It is also broadly compatible with the conceptualizations of others who have studied the topic (see DeLoache, Miller, & Pierroutsakos, 1998;
16、 Klahr,1999; Kuhn, Garcia-Mila, Zohar, & Andersen, 1995; Moshman, 1998, for review). The essence of mature scientific thinking, we claim, is the coordination of theory and evidence in a consciously controlled manner. The qualifier “in a consciously controlled manner” is essential because the thinkin
17、g of even very young childrenSCIENTIFIC THINKING115has been claimed to involve the construction of theories, as a means of understand- ing the world, and their revision in the face of evidence (Wellman & Gelman,1998). It does not follow, however, that young children have explicit awareness of their
18、theories or of the fact that they are undergoing revision. Indeed, it is unlikely that they do, and research we review later in this article supports this assumption. Mature scientific thought, on the other hand, is characterized by a now widely accepted postpositivist philosophy of science as invol
19、ving the examination and in- terpretation of evidence within a theoretical framework that shapes all phases of scientific activity (Kitcher, 1993). Thus, both young intuitive scientists and mature professional scientists make use of both theory and evidence in their thinking. That is not where the d
20、ifference between them lies. Rather, the difference is that in the case of the mature scientist, the coordination of theory and evidence is carried out under a high degree of conscious control (and therefore explicit, consistent, anddemanding criteria).Accordingly, the development in scientific thin
21、king believed to occur across the childhood and adolescent years might be characterized as the achievement of increasing cognitive control over the coordination of theory and evidence. This achievement, note, is metacognitive in nature because it entails mental operations on entities that are themse
22、lves mental operations. In this respect, Inhelder and Piagets (1958) characterization of scientific thinking as involving “operations on operations” is correct. Contrary to their depiction of second-order operations as emerging at adolescence, however, it has subsequently been recognized that metaco
23、gnitive thinking about ones own thought begins to develop much earlier(Brown, 1997; Kuhn, in press-a)a fact highlighted by studies examined in this article and, in particular, those coming from research on theory of mind (see Flavell, 1999, for review). Empirical research on scientific thinking, in
24、contrast, has shown that it may not develop fully even by adulthood (Kuhn et al., 1995). One of the purposes of this article is to connect these two bodies of researchone em- phasizing early competence and the other later lack of competence.Empirical studies of scientific thinking skills can be divi
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