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13 - Asking “Why?” and “What If?”

The Influence of Questions on Children’s Inferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2020

By
Caren M. Walker  and
Angela Nyhout
Edited by
Lucas Payne Butler ,
Samuel Ronfard  and
Kathleen H. Corriveau
Lucas Payne Butler
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
Samuel Ronfard
Affiliation:
University of Toronto Mississauga
Kathleen H. Corriveau
Affiliation:
Boston University
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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.

Keywords

explanationlearningcausal inferencecounterfactualsscientific reasoning
Type
Chapter
Information
The Questioning Child
Insights from Psychology and Education
 , pp. 252 - 280
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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