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1995, Monographs of The Society for Research in Child Development
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. research is that cognitive development can be adequately accounted for in terms of developing knowledge within content domains. As a consequence, findings are largely specific to the domain studied. The major insight that extends across domains is the theory-like organization of knowledge. Even the properties that define simple concepts cluster and mutually support one another. Conceptions of such homeostatic causal clusters, and the mechanisms underlying them, are the "glue" that makes features cohere (Keil, 1991). At a less elementary level, evidence exists suggesting that young children's theories have properties such as consistency, coherence, comprehensiveness, and explanatory power .
Child Development, 2004
Individuals can infer what others are likely to know by clustering knowledge according to common goals, common topics, or common underlying principles. Although young children are sensitive to underlying principles, that manner of clustering might not prevail when other viable means are presented. Two studies examined how a sample of 256 children at ages 5, 7, 9, and 11 decide how to generalize another person's knowledge when goals, topics, and principles are put in conflict. In both studies, younger children preferred generalizing according to goals and topics, whereas older children preferred clustering based on principles related to disciplines. The most naturalistic ways of envisioning how knowledge is clustered in the minds of others therefore seems to change significantly during the elementary school years.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2004
This research studies a relatively unexplored aspect of expertise-the ability to detect causal relational patterns in multiple contexts-and demonstrates learning processes that foster this ability. Using the Ambiguous Sorting Task (AST), in which domain information competes with causal patterns, we previously found that science experts spontaneously noticed and sorted by causal patterns such as positive feedback, while novices sorted primarily by content domain. We investigated two kinds of learning experiences that we claim are needed to achieve high fluency in detecting key cross-domain patterns. We found that direct explication of example phenomena increased people's accuracy in depicting the examples, but did not increase sensitivity to the causal patterns in new examples. However, analogical comparison between parallel examples did lead to greater propensity to detect the causal patterns across diverse examples. Combining within-example explication with between-example alignment led to the greatest gains in generalized sensitivity to causal patterns.
Conference on Modeling and Using Context, 2001
For a few years, partisans of two theoretical approaches have debated about the role attributed to the context concept in the acquisition and the organization of knowledge. The first one is the symbolic information processing system which focuses on the symbolic structures of the mind. The second one is the “situated cognition” theory which postulates that all the action of
Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
The development of cognitive functions follows certain pathways through brain maturation. Concepts taught at school can be reinforced by understanding the related cognitive functions that enhance learning. The cultural and social diversities faced by the education system worldwide can be solved by understanding the unifying cognitive processes of learning. This knowledge can be effectively used to devise better curriculum and training for students. Cognition, conation, and emotional regulation are the main components that determine an individual's efficiency to deal with various situations. How the brain receives input, perceives, and organizes these information lays the foundation for learning. The objectives of the study were (i) to explore agegroup specific inputs for knowledge acquisition, (ii) to relate knowledge organization to the cognitive processes, and (iii) to identify factors that strengthen the knowledge ensemble through subject-domain allied training. The review focused on studies related to elementary school age (below 7 years), middle school age (7-12 years), and high school age (12 years and above). Published journal articles related to the objectives were randomly reviewed to establish a possible relationship. The findings of this review can help to advance student learning practices and instructional strategies. The findings are listed below. (i) Acquisition of knowledge during early childhood is based on sensory-motor integration on which attentional, perceptual, memory, language, and socialization systems develop. As brain development progresses toward adolescence, meta-awareness and social-emotional cognition influence the student learning process. (ii) Knowledge representations can be strengthened by domainspecific training inputs. (iii) Associational integration of the developmental, cognitive, and conative processes are indicators of curriculum strength. (iv) The strengthening of cognitive processes by rerouting through complementary neural circuitry, such as music, arts, real-life-based experiments, and physical exercises, is an effective way to improve child-friendly instructions.
Child Development, 2010
To what extent do children understand that biological processes fall into 1 coherent domain unified by distinct causal principles? In Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 125) kindergartners are given triads of biological and psychological processes and asked to identify which 2 members of the triad belong together. Results show that 5-year-olds correctly cluster biological processes and separate them from psychological ones. Experiments 3 and 4 (N = 64) examine whether or not children make this distinction because they understand that biological and psychological processes operate according to fundamentally different causal mechanisms. The results suggest that 5-yearolds do possess this understanding, and furthermore, they have intuitions about the nature of these different mechanisms. Young children seem to have a clear sense that there are fundamentally different kinds of things in the world, or ontological categories, and they distinguish them by using different causal-explanatory frameworks (
Enfance, 2014
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First International Workshop on Natural Language, …, 2004
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2014
We explore the developmental of sensitivity to causal relations in children's inductive reasoning. Five-, eight-and twelve-year-old children and adults were given trials in which they decided whether a property known to be possessed by members of one category was also possessed by members of a) a taxonomically related category or b) a causally related category. The direction of the causal link was either predictive (prey→predator) or diagnostic (predator→prey) and the property participants reasoned about established a taxonomic or a causal context. There was a causal asymmetry effect across all age groups, with more causal choices when the causal link was predictive than when it was diagnostic. Furthermore, context-sensitive causal reasoning showed a curvilinear development, with causal choices being most frequent for eight-year-olds, regardless of context. Causal inductions decreased thereafter because twelve-year-olds and adults made more taxonomic choices when reasoning in the taxonomic context. These findings suggest that simple causal relations may often be the default knowledge structure in young children's inductive reasoning, that sensitivity to causal direction is present early on, and that children over-generalise their causal knowledge when reasoning.
American Educational Research Journal, 1979
Journal of Educational Psychology, 1996
The purpose of this investigation was to replicate the findings of K. E. Stanovich and A. E. Cunningham (1993) concerning the antecedents of declarative knowledge, using different measures of general ability and TV exposure. In addition, the authors were interested in the relationship between epistemological knowledge and these measures. Ninety-seven introductory psychology students participated. Results showed that measures of both general ability and TV exposure exhibited a stronger relationship to declarative knowledge than that found by K. E. Stanovich and A. E. Cunningham. These differences in results concerning TV exposure were explained by suggesting the possibility that watching educational TV increases literacy whereas watching noneducational TV may actually limit it. The epistemological beliefs of simple and certain knowledge were statistically related to composites of knowledge, ability, and both types of exposure.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2007
Children acquire complex relational representations of the world. Explaining the acquisition of these representations has been a significant challenge for theories of cognitive development. Recent work suggests that two processes, theory revision and redescription, operate in an iterative, complementary fashion to produce new representations. Given a novel situation, children use theory revision to generate a candidate relational structure and can modify that structure in response to error. Redescription detects regularities created through successful use of that structure in interaction with the environment; these regularities are consolidated into new representations, which are then available to the theoryrevision process. The complementary nature of these processes is illustrated by recent work on representational change in a gear-system task and in arithmetic concepts. Theory revision and redescription occupy different, but mutually supportive, niches in knowledge acquisition.
Cognition, 2020
A central component of evaluating others as sources of information involves estimating how much they know about different domains: one might be quite knowledgeable about a certain domain (e.g., clocks), but relatively ignorant about another (e.g., birds). Estimating one's domain knowledge often involves making inferences from specific instances or demonstrations, with some suggesting broader knowledge than others. For instance, an American who demonstrates knowledge of an unfamiliar country like Djibouti likely knows more about geography as a whole compared to an American who demonstrates knowledge of a more familiar country like Canada. The current studies investigate the extent to which one potentially salient kind of knowledge-mechanistic knowledge-signals greater domain knowledge as a whole. Across four developmental studies, we find that both adults and children as young as six think that those who possess mechanistic knowledge about a basic level artifact category (e.g., clocks) are more knowledgeable about its superordinate level category (e.g., machines) than those with factual non-mechanistic knowledge (Studies 1a and 2a). We also find an analogous, yet delayed pattern with biological categories (Studies 1b and 2b). Together, these studies demonstrate that even young children, who possess little mechanistic knowledge themselves, nevertheless have a sophisticated sense of how knowledge of mechanism generalizes across related categories.
Enfance, 2014, issue 3. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4074/S0013754514003097
This article summarizes a comprehensive theory of intellectual organization and growth. The theory specifies a common core of processes (Abstraction, representational Alignment, and Cognizance, i.e., AACog) underlying inference and meaning making. AACog develops over four reconceptualization cycles (episodic representations, representations, rule-based concepts, and principle-based concepts starting at birth, 2, 6, and 11 years, respectively) with two phases in each (production of new mental units and alignment). This sequence relates with changes in processing efficiency and working memory in overlapping cycles such that relations with efficiency are high in the production phases and relations with WM are high in the alignment phases over all cycles. Reconceptualization is self-propelled because AACog continuously generates new mental content expressed in representations of increasing inclusiveness and resolution. Each cycle culminates into insight about the cycle’s representations and underlying inferential processes that is expressed into executive programs of increasing flexibility. Learning addressed to this insight accelerates the course of reconceptualization. Individual differences in intellectual growth are related to both the state of this core and its interaction with different cognitively primary domains (e.g., categorical, quantitative, spatial cognition, etc.). The relations between this theory and brain research are discussed.
Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 2008
Journal of Cognition and Development, 2012
This article summarizes a comprehensive theory of intellectual organization and growth. The theory specifies a common core of processes (Abstraction, representational Alignment, and Cognizance, i.e., AACog) underlying inference and meaning making. AACog develops over four reconceptualization cycles (episodic representations, representations, rule-based concepts, and principle-based concepts starting at birth, 2, 6, and 11 years, respectively) with two phases in each (production of new mental units and alignment). This sequence relates with changes in processing efficiency and working memory in overlapping cycles such that relations with efficiency are high in the production phases and relations with WM are high in the alignment phases over all cycles. Reconceptualization is self-propelled because AACog continuously generates new mental content expressed in representations of increasing inclusiveness and resolution. Each cycle culminates into insight about the cycle’s representations...
International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 2014
This year's International Conference of the Learning Sciences (www.isls.org/icls2014) will feature the theme of "practices encompassing the range of contexts and processes in which people learn." In this first issue of 2014 of ijCSCL, we present four explorations of that theme. We begin with a consideration of Activity Theory as a framework for analyzing the systemic contexts of CSCL practices. This is followed by detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses of knowledge building across the age spectrum of schooling: from primary school (4th and 5th grade) to tertiary school (first year college). Finally, the collaborative construction of knowledge is studied at the global level of adults posting to Wikipedia. In preparation for last year's CSCL conference, a series of editorial introductions to ijCSCL raised the issue of the interrelationships among individual, small-group, and community learning (Stahl 2012, 2013a, b). It is interesting to read the articles in this new issue as in part investigations of such interrelationships. The notion that "interactional resources" such as geometric objects in mathematical problem solving can be seen to be bridging levels of analysis was recently elaborated in (Oner 2013; Stahl 2013c, esp. Ch. 6; Zemel and Koschmann 2013). This notion of resources plays a theoretical role similar to that of artifacts in Activity Theory and appears, for instance, in the scaffolds of epistemic games, the notes of knowledge-building forums and the pivotal-knowledge postings of Wikipedia in the papers of the current issue.
Theories of knowledge representation are a natural starting point for the study of cognition. They indicate, for example, what children learn when they acquire new knowledge and what people mean when they put their knowledge into words. They also place constraints on the kinds of processes that may be used in reasoning. This course will review the core literature related to the representation and processing of knowledge with a particular emphasis on how we categorize objects, events, and abstract entities. For each topic, important issues, theories, findings, and methods will be addressed by examining exemplary research. Each topic will be addressed from multiple perspectives. The perspectives most likely to be represented include cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and computational modeling. The course is required of all graduate students in the Cognition and Development Program. Students from other psychology programs, other Emory departments, and other Atlanta universities are also welcome. Format The course will be conducted as a seminar. Students will be expected to read assigned papers, write weekly reaction papers, and come to class prepared to discuss the readings. Students will also prepare a presentation on a "special topic" and will write an end-of-semester research proposal. Details are provided below. Course Materials Assigned readings will be posted electronically and accessible through Blackboard. You will automatically be enrolled in the Blackboard course site for this class. You may access Blackboard by going to classes.emory.edu and entering your username and password. Readings for each week will be posted in the Course Materials section.
Educational Technology & Society, 2005
This paper assesses university students' acquisition of simple and complex knowledge, in exploring whether the knowledge gap hypothesis (KGH) with its origins in community-based research into people's informal learning from mass media, provides insights into students' acquisition and retention of information. The KGH posits that attempts to equalise knowledge within a community by releasing new information into it often either has no such effect, or even worsens knowledge inequities. The present study set out to ...
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