Book contents
- The Questioning Child
- The Questioning Child
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Questions about Questions
- 2 Questions in Development
- 3 The Point, the Shrug, and the Question of Clarification
- 4 The Quest for Comprehension and Learning
- 5 Children’s Question-Asking across Cultural Communities
- 6 The Development of Information-Requesting Gestures in Infancy and Their Role in Shaping Learning Outcomes
- 7 Developmental Changes in Question-Asking
- 8 Understanding Developmental and Individual Differences in the Process of Inquiry during the Preschool Years
- 9 “Why Are There Big Squares and Little Squares?”
- 10 Children’s Questions in Social and Cultural Perspective
- 11 Mothers’ Use of Questions and Children’s Learning and Language Development
- 12 Teaching and Learning by Questioning
- 13 Asking “Why?” and “What If?”
- 14 What Makes a Good Question? Towards an Epistemic Classification
- 15 The Questioning Child
- Index
- References
13 - Asking “Why?” and “What If?”
The Influence of Questions on Children’s Inferences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2020
Book contents
- The Questioning Child
- The Questioning Child
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Questions about Questions
- 2 Questions in Development
- 3 The Point, the Shrug, and the Question of Clarification
- 4 The Quest for Comprehension and Learning
- 5 Children’s Question-Asking across Cultural Communities
- 6 The Development of Information-Requesting Gestures in Infancy and Their Role in Shaping Learning Outcomes
- 7 Developmental Changes in Question-Asking
- 8 Understanding Developmental and Individual Differences in the Process of Inquiry during the Preschool Years
- 9 “Why Are There Big Squares and Little Squares?”
- 10 Children’s Questions in Social and Cultural Perspective
- 11 Mothers’ Use of Questions and Children’s Learning and Language Development
- 12 Teaching and Learning by Questioning
- 13 Asking “Why?” and “What If?”
- 14 What Makes a Good Question? Towards an Epistemic Classification
- 15 The Questioning Child
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter describes a growing body of work that demonstrates the efficacy of specific questions (“why” “why else?” and “what if?”) in supporting children’s ability to access their intuitive reasoning skills and apply them to tasks involving sophisticated causal and scientific thinking. We describe distinct mechanisms by which each of these questions results in unique types of inferences, and argue that each one has selective effects on a learner’s inferences, depending upon the evidence available, the state of their prior knowledge, and the relation of that prior knowledge to the true state of the world. We begin with a brief review of the well-established research on the efficacy of prompts for explanation, focusing on the developmental literature. We then offer a novel proposal, drawing on the adult research, that engaging children in the evaluation of alternative outcomes via prompting for multiple explanations or engagement with counterfactuals may provide a different avenue for fostering distinct sets of causal reasoning skills. Finally, we turn to a discussion of the relation between the content and process of children’s reasoning in response to these questions, and end with some suggestions for future research.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Questioning ChildInsights from Psychology and Education, pp. 252 - 280Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
References
Amsel, E., and Brock, S. (1996). The development of evidence evaluation skills. Cognitive Development, 11, 523–50. https://doi:10.1016/S0885-2014(96)90016-7Google Scholar
Anderson, C. A., Lepper, M. R., and Ross, L. (1980). Perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in the persistence of discredited information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1037–49. https://doi:10.1037/h0077720Google Scholar
Beck, S. R. (2016). Why what is counterfactual really matters: A response to Weisberg and Gopnik. Cognitive Science, 40, 253–6. https://doi:10.1111/cogs.12235Google ScholarPubMed
Beck, S. R., and Riggs, K. J. (2014). Developing thoughts about what might have been. Child Development Perspectives, 8, 175–9. https://doi:10.1111/cdep.12082Google Scholar
Beck, S. R., Robinson, E. J., Carroll, D. J., and Apperly, I. A. (2006). Children’s thinking about counterfactuals and future hypotheticals as possibilities. Child Development, 77(2), 413–26. https://doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00879.xGoogle Scholar
Berthold, K., Röder, H., Knörzer, D., Kessler, W., and Renkl, A. (2011). The double-edged effects of explanation prompts. Computers in Human Behavior, 27, 69–75. https://doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.05.025Google Scholar
Branscombe, N. R., Owen, S., Garstka, T. A., and Coleman, J. (1996). Rape and accident counterfactuals: Who might have done otherwise and would it have changed the outcome? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26, 1042–67. https://doi:10.1111/j1559-1816.1996.tb01124.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchsbaum, D., Bridgers, S., Weisberg, D. S., and Gopnik, A. (2012). The power of possibility: Causal learning, counterfactual reasoning, and pretend play. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367, 2202–12. https://doi:10.1098/rstb.2012.0122CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Byrne, R. M. (2002). Mental models and counterfactual thoughts about what might have been. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 426–31. https://doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(02)01974-5Google Scholar
Byrne, R. M. (2005). The rational imagination: How people create alternatives to reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Byrne, R. M. (2016). Counterfactual thought. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 135–57. https://doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033249Google Scholar
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.Google Scholar
Chen, Z., and Klahr, D. (1999). All other things being equal: Acquisition and transfer of the control of variables strategy. Child development, 70, 1098–120. https://doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00081Google Scholar
Chi, M. T. (2000). Self-explaining expository texts: The dual processes of generating inferences and repairing mental models. In Glaser, R. (ed.), Advances in instructional psychology (pp. 161–238). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.Google Scholar
Chi, M. T. (2009). Active‐constructive‐interactive: A conceptual framework for differentiating Learning activities. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1, 73–105. https://doi:10.1111/j.1756-8765.2008.01005.xGoogle Scholar
Chi, M. T., Bassok, M., Lewis, M. W., Reimann, P., and Glaser, R. (1989). Self‐explanations: How students study and use examples in learning to solve problems. Cognitive Science, 13,145–82. https://doi:10.1207/s15516709cog1302_1Google Scholar
Chi, M. T., De Leeuw, N., Chiu, M. H., and LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding. Cognitive Science, 18, 439–77. https://doi:10.1207/s15516709cog1803_3Google Scholar
Chinn, C. A., and Brewer, W. F. (1998). An empirical test of a taxonomy of responses to anomalous data in science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35, 623–54. https://doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-2736(199808)35:6<623::aid-tea3>3.0.CO;2-OGoogle Scholar
Chinn, C. A., and Malhotra, B. A. (2002). Children’s responses to anomalous scientific data: How is conceptual change impeded? Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 327–43. https://doi:10.1037//0022-0663.94.2.327Google Scholar
Cook, C., and Schulz, L. (2009). “Bob thinks this but Emily thinks that”: Contrastive beliefs in kindergartners’ scientific reasoning. 31st Annual Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society Conference. Amsterdam, Netherlands.Google Scholar
Crowley, K., and Siegler, R. S. (1999). Explanation and generalization in young children’s strategy learning. Child Development, 70, 304–16. https://doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00023Google Scholar
De Houwer, J., Vandorpe, S., and Beckers, T. (2005). Evidence for the role of higher order reasoning processes in cue competition and other learning phenomena. Learning & Behavior, 33, 239–49. https://doi:10.3758/BF03196066Google Scholar
Dias, M. G., and Harris, P. L. (1988). The effect of make‐believe play on deductive reasoning. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6, 207–21. https://doi:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1988.tb01095.xGoogle Scholar
Dias, M. G., and Harris, P. L. (1990). The influence of the imagination on reasoning by young children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8, 305–18. https://doi:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1990.tb00847.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickinson, A. (2001). The 28th Bartlett Memorial Lecture: Causal learning. An associative analysis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54B, 3–25. https://doi:10.1080/713932741Google Scholar
Engle, J., and Walker, C. M. (2018). Considering alternatives facilitates anomaly detection in preschoolers. In Miyake, N., Peebles, D., and Cooper, R. P. (eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Madison, WI: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Epstude, K., and Roese, N. J. (2008). The functional theory of counterfactual thinking. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12, 168–92. https://doi:10.1177/1088868308316091Google Scholar
Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288–99. https://doi:10.1037/0096-1523.1.3.288Google Scholar
Fischhoff, B. (1982). Debiasing. In Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A. (eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 422–44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Galinsky, A. D., and Moskowitz, G. B. (2000). Counterfactuals as behavioral primes: Priming the simulation heuristic and consideration of alternatives. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 384–409. https://doi:10.1006/jesp.1999.1409Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford Series in Cognitive Dev. https://doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195154061.001.0001Google Scholar
German, T. P., and Defeyter, M. A. (2000). Immunity to functional fixedness in young children. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 707–12. https://doi:10.3758/BF03213010Google Scholar
Gonzalez, A., Shafto, P., Bonawtiz, E. B., and Gopnik, A. (2012). Is that your final answer? The effects of neutral queries on children’s choices. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (vol. 34, no. 34).Google Scholar
Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby: What children’s minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. https://doi:10.1080/13698036.2010.488018Google Scholar
Gopnik, A., and Meltzoff, A. N. (1997). Words, thoughts, and theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gopnik, A., and Schulz, L. (eds.) (2007). Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176803.001.0001Google Scholar
Gopnik, A., and Walker, C. M. (2013). Considering counterfactuals: The relationship between causal learning and pretend play. American Journal of Play, 6, 15–28.Google Scholar
Gopnik, A., Sobel, D. M., Schulz, L. E., and Glymour, C. (2001). Causal learning mechanisms in very young children: Two-, three-, and four-year-olds infer causal relations from patterns of variation and covariation. Developmental Psychology, 37, 620–9. https://doi:10.1037/0012-1649.37.5.620Google Scholar
Greene, J., Sandoval, W., and Braten, I. (eds.) (2016). Handbook of epistemic cognition. New York: Routledge. https://doi:10.4324/9781315795225CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, P. L. (2000). The work of the imagination. Blackwell Publishing. https://doi:10.1093/mind/111.442.414Google Scholar
Harris, P. L., German, T., and Mills, C. (1996). Children’s use of counterfactual thinking in causal reasoning. Cognition, 61, 233–59. https://doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(96)00715-9Google Scholar
Hirt, E. R., and Markman, K. D. (1995). Multiple explanation: A consider-an-alternative strategy for debiasing judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 1069–86. https://doi:10.1037/0022-3514.69.6.1069Google Scholar
Hirt, E. R., Kardes, F. R., and Markman, K. D. (2004). Activating a mental simulation mind-set through generation of alternatives: Implications for debiasing in related and unrelated domains. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 374–83. https://doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2003.07.009Google Scholar
Horobin, K., and Acredolo, C. (1989). The impact of probability judgments on reasoning about multiple possibilities. Child Development, 183–200. https://doi:10.2307/1131084Google Scholar
Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1982). The simulation heuristic. In Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A. (eds.), Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 201–8). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi:10.1017/CBO9780511809477.015Google Scholar
Keil, F. C. (1992). Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kelemen, D. (1999). Function, goals and intention: Children’s teleological reasoning about objects. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 461–8. https://doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01402-3Google Scholar
Klahr, D., and Nigam, M. (2004). The equivalence of learning paths in early science instruction effects of direct instruction and discovery learning. Psychological Science, 15, 661–7. https://doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00737.xGoogle Scholar
Koehler, D. J. (1991). Explanation, imagination, and confidence in judgment. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 499–519. https://doi:10.1037/0033-2909.110.3.499Google Scholar
Koriat, A., Lichtenstein, S., and Fischhoff, B. (1980). Reasons for confidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6, 107–18. https://doi:10.1037/0278-7393.6.2.107Google Scholar
Kuhn, D. (2002). What is scientific thinking and how does it develop? In Goswami, U. (ed.), Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development (pp. 371–93). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Kuhn, D., and Katz, J. (2009). Are self-explanations always beneficial? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 103, 386–94. https://doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.03.003Google Scholar
Kuhn, D., and Phelps, E. (1982). The development of problem-solving strategies. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 17, 1–44. https://doi:10.1016/S0065-2407(08)60356-0Google Scholar
Kuhn, D., Arvidsson, T. S., Lesperance, R., and Corprew, R. (2017). Can engaging in science practices promote deep understanding of them? Science Education, 101, 232–50. https://doi:10.1002/sce.21263CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kushnir, T., Gopnik, A., Schulz, L., and Danks, D. (2003). Inferring hidden causes. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (vol. 25, no. 25).Google Scholar
Legare, C. H. (2012). Exploring explanation: Explaining inconsistent evidence informs exploratory, hypothesis‐testing behavior in young children. Child Development, 83, 173–85. https://doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01691.xGoogle Scholar
Legare, C. H., and Lombrozo, T. (2014). Selective effects of explanation on learning during early childhood. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 126, 198–212. https://doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2014.03.001Google Scholar
Lombrozo, T. (2006). The structure and function of explanations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 464–70. https://doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.08.004Google Scholar
Lombrozo, T. (2012). Explanation and abductive inference. In Holyoak, K. J. and Morrison, R. G. (eds.), Oxford handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 260–76). https://doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199734689.013.0014Google Scholar
Lombrozo, T., and Carey, S. (2006). Functional explanation and the function of explanation. Cognition, 99, 167–204. https://doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2004.12.009Google Scholar
Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., and Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1231–43. https://doi:10.1037/0022-3514.47.6.1231Google Scholar
Lucas, C. G., Bridgers, S., Griffiths, T. L., and Gopnik, A. (2014). When children are better (or at least more open-minded) learners than adults: Developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships. Cognition, 131, 284–99. https://doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.010Google Scholar
Mackie, J. L. (1974). Truth, probability, and paradox: A reply to James E. Tomberlin’s review. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 34, 593–4. https://doi:10.2307/2106821Google Scholar
Markman, K. D., McMullen, M. N., and Elizaga, R. A. (2008). Counterfactual thinking, persistence, and performance: A test of the reflection and evaluation model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 421–8. https://doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2007.01.001Google Scholar
McCormack, T., Butterfill, S., Hoerl, C., and Burns, P. (2009). Cue competition effects and young children’s causal and counterfactual inferences. Developmental Psychology, 45, 1563–75. https://doi:10.1037/a0017408Google Scholar
McCormack, T., Simms, V., McGourty, J., and Beckers, T. (2013). Encouraging children to think counterfactually enhances blocking in a causal learning task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 1910–26. https://doi:10.1080/17470218.2013.767847Google Scholar
Mercier, H., and Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 34, 57–74.Google Scholar
Mitchell, C. J., Lovibond, P. F., and Condoleon, M. (2005). Evidence for deductive reasoning in blocking of causal judgments. Learning and Motivation, 36, 77–87. https://doi:10.1016/j.lmot.2004.09.001Google Scholar
Moshman, D. (2015). Epistemic cognition and development: The psychology of justification and truth. New York: Psychology Press. https://doi:10.1080/02698595.2015.1195150Google Scholar
Narvaez, D., Gleason, T., Mitchell, C., and Bentley, J. (1999). Moral theme comprehension in children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 477–87. https://doi:10.1037/0022-0663.91.3.477Google Scholar
Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 38. https://doi:10.2307/1165788Google Scholar
Nyhout, A., and Ganea, P. A. (2019). Mature counterfactual reasoning in 4- and 5-year-olds. Cognition, 183, 57–66.Google Scholar
Nyhout, A., Iannuzziello, A., Walker, C.M., & Ganea, P. (2019). Thinking counterfactually supports children’s ability to conduct a controlled test of a hypothesis. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freska (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Montreal, CA: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Pearl, J. (2000). Causal inference without counterfactuals: Comment. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 95(450), 428–31. https://doi:10.2307/2669380Google Scholar
Penner, D. E., and Klahr, D. (1996). The interaction of domain‐specific knowledge and domain‐general discovery strategies: A study with sinking objects. Child Development, 67, 2709–27. https://doi:10.2307/1131748Google Scholar
Perner, J., and Rafetseder, E. (2011). Counterfactual and other forms of conditional reasoning: Children lost in the nearest possible world. In Hoerl, C., McCormack, T., and Beck, S. (eds.), Understanding counterfactuals/understanding causation (pp. 90–109). New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199590698.003.0005Google Scholar
Rafetseder, E., and Perner, J. (2014). Counterfactual reasoning: Sharpening conceptual distinctions in developmental studies. Child Development Perspectives, 8, 54–8. https://doi:10.1111/cdep.12061Google Scholar
Rafetseder, E., Schwitalla, M., and Perner, J. (2013). Counterfactual reasoning: From childhood to adulthood. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 389–404. https://doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2012.10.010Google Scholar
Rhodes, M., Leslie, S. J., Saunders, K., Dunham, Y., and Cimpian, A. (2018). How does social essentialism affect the development of inter‐group relations? Developmental Science, 21. https://doi:10.1111/desc.12509Google Scholar
Roese, N. J., and Olson, J. M. (1997). Counterfactual thinking: The intersection of affect and function. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 29, 1–59. https://doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60015-5Google Scholar
Ross, L. D., Lepper, M. R., Strack, F., and Steinmetz, J. (1977). Social explanation and social expectation: Effects of real and hypothetical explanations on subjective likelihood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 817–29. https://doi:10.1037/0022-3514.35.11.817Google Scholar
Sanna, L. J., and Schwarz, N. (2003). Debiasing the hindsight bias: The role of accessibility Experiences and (mis)attributions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 287–95. https://doi:10.1016/S0022-1031(02)00528-0Google Scholar
Sanna, L. J., Schwarz, N., and Stocker, S. L. (2002). When debiasing backfires: Accessible content and accessibility experiences in debiasing hindsight. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 497–502. https://doi:10.1037/0278-7393.28.3.497Google Scholar
Schauble, L. (1996). The development of scientific reasoning in knowledge-rich contexts. Developmental Psychology, 32, 102–19.Google Scholar
Schulz, L. E., and Gopnik, A. (2004). Causal learning across domains. Developmental Psychology, 40, 162–76. https://doi:10.1037/0012-1649.40.2.162Google Scholar
Schulz, L. E., Gopnik, A., and Glymour, C. (2007). Preschool children learn about causal structure from conditional interventions. Developmental Science, 10, 322–32. https://doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00587.xGoogle Scholar
Schwarz, N. (1998). Accessible content and accessibility experiences: The interplay of declarative and experiential information in judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 87–99. https://doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0202_2Google Scholar
Schwarz, N., and Vaughn, L. A. (2002). The availability heuristic revisited: Ease of recall and content of recall as distinct sources of information. In Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., and Kahneman, D. (eds.), Current perspectives on judgment under uncertainty (2nd ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi:10.1017/CBO9780511808098.007Google Scholar
Seiver, E., Gopnik, A., and Goodman, N. D. (2013). Did she jump because she was the big sister or because the trampoline was safe? Causal inference and the development of social attribution. Child Development, 84, 443–54. https://doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01865.xGoogle Scholar
Siegler, R. S. (2002). Microgenetic studies of self-explanation. In Granott, N. and Parziale, J. (eds.), Microdevelopment: Transition processes in development and learning (pp. 31–58). https://doi:10.1017/CBO9780511489709.002Google Scholar
Simms, V., McCormack, T., and Beckers, T. (2012). Additivity pretraining and cue competition effects: Developmental evidence for a reasoning-based account of causal learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 38, 180–90. https://doi:10.1037/a0027202Google Scholar
Sloman, S. (2005). Causal models: How people think about the world and its alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183115.001.0001Google Scholar
Sobel, D. M., Tenenbaum, J. B., and Gopnik, A. (2004). Children’s causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers. Cognitive Science, 28, 303–33. https://doi:10.1207/s15516709cog2803_1Google Scholar
Spellman, B. A., and Mandel, D. R. (1999). When possibility informs reality: Counterfactual thinking as a cue to causality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 120–3. https://doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00028CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, M. G. (1996). The development of children’s beliefs about social and biological aspects of gender differences. Child Development, 67, 1555–71. https://doi:10.2307/1131718Google Scholar
Taylor, M. G., Rhodes, M., and Gelman, S. A. (2009). Boys will be boys; cows will be cows: Children’s essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child development, 80(2), 461–81. https://doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01272.xGoogle Scholar
Tetlock, P., and Belkin, A. (1996). Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tetlock, P. E., and Lebow, R. N. (2001). Poking counterfactual holes in covering laws: Cognitive styles and historical reasoning. American Political Science Review, 95, 829–43. https://doi:10.1017/S0003055400400043Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., and Gopnik, A. (2013a). Causality and imagination. In Taylor, M. (ed.), Oxford handbook of the development of the imagination (pp. 342–58). https://doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195395761.013.0022Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., and Gopnik, A. (2013b). Pretense and possibility: A theoretical proposal about the effects of pretend play on development: Comment on Lillard, Lerner, Hopkins, Dore, Smith, & Palmquist (2013). Psychological Bulletin, 139, 40–4. https://doi:10.1037/a0030151Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., and Gopnik, A. (2014). Toddlers infer higher-order relational principles in causal learning. Psychological Science, 25, 161–9. https://doi:10.1177/0956797613502983Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., and Gopnik, A. (2017). Discriminating relational and perceptual judgments: Evidence from human toddlers. Cognition, 166, 23–37. https://doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.013Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., and Lombrozo, T. (2017). Explaining the moral story. Invited paper for Special issue: Moral learning in Cognition, 167, 266–81.Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., Lombrozo, T., Legare, C., and Gopnik, A. (2014). Explanation prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties. Cognition, 133, 343–57. https://doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.07.008Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., Bridgers, S., and Gopnik, A. (2016a). The early emergence and puzzling decline of relational reasoning: Effects of knowledge and search on inferring abstract concepts. Cognition, 156, 30–40. https://doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.07.008Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., Buchsbaum, D., Banerjee, E., & Gopnik, A. (in prep). Imagining interventions: Complex causal reasoning in pretend play.Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., Lombrozo, T., Williams, J. J., Rafferty, A. N., and Gopnik, A. (2016b). Explaining constrains causal learning in childhood. Child Development, 88, 229–46. https://doi:10.1111/cdev.12590Google Scholar
Walker, C. M., Bonawitz, E., and Lombrozo, T. (2017). Effects of explaining on children’s preference for simpler hypotheses. Invited paper for Special issue: The process of explanation in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. https://doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1144-0Google Scholar
Weisberg, D. S., and Gopnik, A. (2013). Pretense, counterfactuals, and Bayesian causal models: Why what is not real really matters. Cognitive Science, 37, 1368–81. https://doi:10.1111/cogs.12069Google Scholar
Wellman, H. M., and Gelman, S. A. (1992). Cognitive development: Foundational theories of core domains. Annual review of psychology, 43, 337–75. https://doi:10.1146/annurev.ps.43.020192.002005CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wellman, H. M., and Liu, D. (2007). Causal reasoning as informed by the early development of explanations. In Gopnik, A. and Schulz, L. (eds.), Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation. https://doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176803.003.0017Google Scholar
Wenzlhuemer, R. (2009). Counterfactual thinking as a scientific method. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 34, 27–54. https://doi:10.11588/heidok.00019676Google Scholar
Wilkenfeld, D. A., and Lombrozo, T. (2015). Inference to the best explanation (IBE) versus explaining for the best inference (EBI). Science & Education, 24, 1059–77. https://doi:10.1007/s11191-015-9784-4Google Scholar
Williams, J. J., and Lombrozo, T. (2010). The role of explanation in discovery and generalization: Evidence from category learning. Cognitive Science, 34, 776–806. https://doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01113.xGoogle Scholar
Williams, J. J., and Lombrozo, T. (2013). Explanation and prior knowledge interact to guide learning. Cognitive Psychology, 66, 55–84. https://doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2012.09.002Google Scholar
Williams, J. J., Lombrozo, T., and Rehder, B. (2013). The hazards of explanation: Overgeneralization in the face of exceptions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142, 1006–14. https://doi:10.1037/a0030996Google Scholar
Woodward, J. (2003). Making things happen: A theory of causal explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, J. (2007). Interventionist theories of causation in psychological perspective. In Gopnik, A. and Schulz, L. (eds.), Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation (pp. 19–36). https://doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176803.003.0002Google Scholar
Yu, Y., Bonawitz, E., and Shafto, P. (2017). Pedagogical questions in parent–child conversations. Child Development (online first). https://doi:10.1111/cdev.12850Google Scholar
Zimmerman, C. (2000). The development of scientific reasoning skills. Developmental Review, 20, 99–149.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, C. (2007). The development of scientific thinking skills in elementary and middle school. Developmental Review, 27, 172–223. https://doi:10.1016/j.dr.2006.12.001Google Scholar
Zimmerman, C., and Glaser, R. (2001). Testing positive versus negative claims: A preliminary investigation of the role of cover story on the assessment of experimental design skills. CSE Technical Report. https://doi:10.1037/a0017162Google Scholar
- 9
- Cited by