Peteranderl Sonja, Edelsbrunner Peter A
ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Front Psychol. 2020 Dec 1;11:531565. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.531565. eCollection 2020.
Prior research has identified age 9-11 as a critical period for the development of the control-of-variables strategy (CVS). We examine the stability of interindividual differences in children's CVS skills with regard to their precursor skills during this critical developmental period. To this end, we relate two precursor skills of CVS at age 9 to four skills constituting fully developed CVS more than 2 years later, controlling for children's more general cognitive development. Note that = 170 second- to fourth-graders worked on multiple choice-assessments of their understanding of indeterminacy of evidence and of confounding. We find relations between these two precursor skills and children's CVS skills 2 years later at age 11 in , and controlled experiments, and in recognizing the inconclusiveness of confounded comparisons (). In accordance with the perspective that both indeterminacy and confounding constitute critical, related yet distinct elements of CVS, both precursor skills contribute to the prediction of later CVS. Together, the two precursor skills can explain 39% of students' later CVS mastery. Overall, the understanding of indeterminacy is a stronger predictor of fully developed CVS than that of confounding. The understanding of confounding, however, is a better predictor of the more difficult CVS sub-skills of understanding the inconclusiveness of confounded comparisons, and of planning a correctly controlled experiment. Importantly, both precursor skills maintain interactive predictive strength when controlling for children's general cognitive abilities and reading comprehension, showing that the developmental dynamics of CVS and its precursor skills cannot be fully ascribed to general cognitive development. We discuss implications of these findings for theories about the development of CVS and broader scientific reasoning.
先前的研究已确定9至11岁是变量控制策略（CVS）发展的关键时期。我们研究了在这个关键发展阶段，儿童CVS技能的个体间差异相对于其前期技能的稳定性。为此，我们将9岁时CVS的两种前期技能与两年多后构成完全发展的CVS的四种技能联系起来，并控制了儿童更一般的认知发展。请注意，170名二至四年级学生参与了关于他们对证据不确定性和混淆性理解的多项选择评估。我们发现，在控制实验以及识别混淆比较的不确定性方面，这两种前期技能与儿童11岁时两年后的CVS技能之间存在关联。根据不确定性和混淆性都是CVS关键的、相关但又不同的要素这一观点，这两种前期技能都有助于预测后期的CVS。这两种前期技能共同可以解释学生后期CVS掌握情况的39%。总体而言，对不确定性的理解比混淆性更能预测完全发展的CVS。然而，对混淆性的理解在预测更难的CVS子技能方面表现更好，这些子技能包括理解混淆比较的不确定性以及规划正确的控制实验。重要的是，在控制儿童的一般认知能力和阅读理解时，这两种前期技能都保持着交互预测强度，这表明CVS及其前期技能的发展动态不能完全归因于一般认知发展。我们讨论了这些发现对CVS发展理论和更广泛科学推理的意义。
