Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK.
Br J Dev Psychol. 2010 Sep;28(Pt 3):523-46. doi: 10.1348/026151009x449568.
This paper examines the development and consistency of children's (4, 7, 10, and 14 years) naïve concepts of inheritance using three tasks. A modified adoption task asked participants to distinguish between biological and social parentage in their predictions and explanations of the origins of different feature types (physical characteristics, disabilities, and personality traits). The causal mechanisms task asked participants to rate their preference for various mechanisms of inheritance for physical features. The family relatedness task required participants to provide judgements on the relatedness of family members and explain their understanding of kinship terms. Developmental trends were revealed in all three tasks. There was a trend towards increased consistency in judgements across tasks with age, but low correlations between explanations given in different task contexts. Findings are discussed with reference to the onset and variability of inheritance concepts and the implications for education and future research.
本文使用三项任务考察了儿童（4 岁、7 岁、10 岁和 14 岁）对遗传的朴素概念的发展和一致性。一项改良的领养任务要求参与者在预测和解释不同特征类型（身体特征、残疾和个性特征）的起源时，区分生物和社会父母。因果机制任务要求参与者对身体特征的各种遗传机制进行偏好评级。亲属关系任务要求参与者对家庭成员的亲属关系进行判断，并解释他们对亲属关系术语的理解。在所有三个任务中都发现了发展趋势。随着年龄的增长，判断在任务之间的一致性呈上升趋势，但在不同任务背景下给出的解释之间相关性较低。研究结果结合遗传概念的出现和可变性以及对教育和未来研究的影响进行了讨论。
