Development of children's beliefs about everyday reasoning.

Abstract

This dissertation extends prior work on children's metacognitive and epistemological development to investigate the development of children's knowledge about reasoning as a mental process, focusing on children's understanding of the difference between reasoning and non-reasoning and the difference between good and bad reasoning. Studies 1 and 2 characterized US adults' beliefs, providing a basis for developmental research with children in first, third, and fifth grades. Study 3 tested children's and adults' ability to distinguish reasoning from two kinds of non-reasoning cases: (1) cases where people used non-reasoning in typical reasoning situations, and (2) cases where people reacted appropriately, but automatically, to an environmental stimulus, in terms of the amount of thinking, mental effort, and time involved. Results showed that adults and children of all ages distinguished reasoning from non-reasoning in the first case, but only older children and adults did so in the second. For cases of automatic responding, younger children conflated appropriate responses with effortful thinking. Study 4 tested children's and adults' ability to differentiate good and bad thinking processes, including: (1) using reliable cognitive strategies vs. shortcut methods, (2) considering pros and cons vs. only pros, (3) considering all alternatives vs. jumping to conclusions, and (4) basing conclusions on evidence vs. a hunch. Results showed that by first grade children made some distinctions between good and bad thinking, but not until third grade did they distinguish them for all scenario types. A second condition examined the effect of conflicting outcome information on children's quality judgments. When good processes were paired with bad outcomes (and vice versa), first-graders tended to base quality judgments on outcome, not process, and third-graders rated good and bad cases similarly. Only fifth-graders and adults appropriately based quality judgments on underlying thinking processes. This work identifies the elementary school years as a period of significant development in children's metacognitive knowledge about reasoning, revealing changes in children's basic beliefs about when reasoning occurs, their knowledge about good and bad reasoning processes, and how they integrate process and outcome information into broader concepts of thinking quality.