The goal of the proposed research is to explore the development and change of young children?s misconceptions about physics. The PI challenges the common interpretation of misconceptions as reflecting stable, a priori concepts, some of which must be overcome in order to come to a to sophisticated formal understanding in the domain. A common recommendation is to engage children?s misconceptions first, and then to provide them with disconfirming evidence. Unfortunately, children show a surprising resistance to changing their mistaken beliefs, and spontaneous emergence of correct beliefs is rare. In this proposal, the PI draws on another set of findings in basic cognition indicating that a child?s misconceptions, rather than being a stable part of the child?s knowledge, are an attempt to organize and make sense of the immediate context in which the child acts. These findings imply that a successful teaching intervention could provide children with a sophisticated organizing principle first, rather than letting them come up with one on their own. However, the effectiveness of such an alternative teaching approach has not been tested explicitly. The proposed project will involve 14 randomized and controlled experiments ranging from those investigating the nature and development of children?s tendency to organize pieces of information to those testing the effectiveness of an intervention, based on these principles, with elementary school children.
