Collaborative Research: How Recognizing Gaps in Explanations Influences Children's Interest in Learning

University Of Texas At Dallas, Richardson TX

Investigators

Abstract

The ECR (Education and Human Resources Core Research) program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. The complex domain of biology has causal pathways that are not always readily apparent to young children, and their explanations often contain many misconceptions and gaps in understanding. This project will add to a limited body of research on how children's recognition of information gaps influence subsequent interest in learning in formal and informal learning settings. The project will examine to what extent, if any, receiving or producing explanations motivates children's future learning, with three specific goals: (1) to examine whether children who first recognize that an explanation has significant gaps are interested in engaging in further learning of a particular topic; (2) to explore how the source of the explanation (by self or others) relates to the link between recognizing information gaps and future learning; and (3) to develop instructional strategies that can be used to induce students' recognition of explanatory gaps, measuring outcomes for these strategies, including children's subsequent ability to critically evaluate explanations and their interest in future learning. The conceptual framework will be guided by the social-cognitive theory, sociocultural theory, and mechanistic reasoning. This combined theoretical framing will promote a better assessment of which processes drive children's explanation evaluation - a crucial part of learning from others - and how mechanistic explanations can be useful lenses for analyzing the interactions of domain-specific (prior knowledge) and domain-general knowledge about learning. This project will use laboratory-based quantitative methods and classroom-based teaching experiments. The quantitative methods include ANCOVAs of multiple covariates about a model that will be developed and implemented to explain developmental, individual, and task differences in responses to information gaps in scientific explanations. Behavioral measures will include ratings of explanation quality and individual difference measures, such as self-reported interest, biological knowledge, and interest in acquiring new information. Based on results from laboratory studies, scaffolds will be developed for classroom contexts to support children's productive engagement in critically evaluating biological explanations. A subset of the above measures will be use to collect pre-post data from classroom participants. Conjecture mapping will be used to conceptualize specific links between scaffolds, mediating processes, and outcomes. Classroom video and observations will be used to determine the extent to which the design scaffolds lead to the hypothesized mediating processes and ultimately the desired learning outcomes of effective evaluation and generation of mechanistic explanations of biological phenomena. Outcomes from these studies will advance scientific understanding of young children's explanation evaluation and construction, as well as provide a suite of scaffolds to support effective education practice. Combining lab and classroom-based research will lead to the development of more ecologically-valid methodologies for studying, and impacting, learning behaviors in ways that are beneficial to interdisciplinary research and education. Insights from the research will be beneficial to parents, children and teachers in both formal and informal settings. Finally, the project will provide insight into creating developmentally-appropriate interventions to help determine whether children of a certain age might benefit from instruction focused on recognizing explanatory gaps in order to motivate them to seek out better answers.