1977 — 1985 |
Klahr, David |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Problem Solving Processes in Pre-School Children @ Carnegie-Mellon University |
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1986 — 1990 |
Klahr, David |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Logo Debugging Skills: Analysis, Instruction and Assessment @ Carnegie-Mellon University
This research addresses the question of how an important computer programming skill -- debugging -- is acquired by elementary and middle- school children, and what the cognitive consequences are of acquiring that skill. One preliminary goal of the proposed research is the development of a well-specified and empirically-supported account of what a child has to know in order to debug a computer program. The proposed work extends preliminary studies of the debugging skills acquired during the course of a normal LOGO curriculum, and it provides for further assessment and elaboration of a computer-simulation model of the precise components of debugging skill. The work will have several interacting components: (1) Empirical evaluation of the model based on a study of experienced programmers' debugging processes; (2) Further development of precise assessment procedures for determining what component skills a student has acquired; (3) Extending the model to a wider range of programming contexts; (4) Using the model to guide specific instructional procedures in teaching debugging skills; (5) Extending and applying a complete one-semester LOGO curriculum with an emphasis on instruction in an assessment of debugging skills; (6) Determining the extent to which debugging skills, once taught, can transfer to near and far tasks; (7) Construction of a model-based prototype debugging aid on a powerful graphics workstation.
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1987 — 1988 |
Klahr, David Kotovsky, Kenneth (co-PI) [⬀] Kotovsky, Kenneth (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Simon and Cognition: a Symposium @ Carnegie-Mellon University |
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1990 — 1993 |
Klahr, David |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Scientific Discovery Processes of Adults and Children @ Carnegie-Mellon University
The goal of the proposed research is to advance our knowledge about the psychological processes involved in scientific reasoning, and the development of those processes. The empirical work will be an extension of earlier studies of how both adults and pre-adolescent children discover the rules governing a hidden mechanism on a complex device. It will be guided by conceptualization of scientific discovery that shows how search in two problem spaces (an hypothesis space and an experiment space) shapes hypothesis generation, experimental design and the evaluation of hypotheses. The proposed research will take place on five interrelated fronts, including: Further empirical investigations of how people discover hidden mechanisms in devices: This series of studies will address the role of prior knowledge in the discovery of how a device works, how hypotheses are translated into experiments, how experimental results are translated into theories and hypotheses, the role of memory in scientific reasoning, the effect of different types of instruction on scientific reasoning, and the different strategies that can be used in scientific reasoning. Extension of context from discovery of mechanisms to discovery of properties: Previous research focused on how people discover mechanisms while reasoning about devices. The second set of proposed studies will be set in a radically different domain-reasoning about the chemistry of an unknown substance. The focus here will be on how people discover properties rather than processes, and the extension to a new domain will test the generality of the model. Further investigations of the development of scientific reasoning skills: Studies in both contexts will continue to address developmental issues: What are the underlying processes for inducing general hypotheses from data that appear to be available to adults, but not children? How does the ability to evaluate evidence develop? Why do children have great difficulty changing the frame in which their hypotheses are constructed? Extension of the specific content of the studies from reasoning about the physical and technological would to reasoning about social domains. Is the process of hypothesis formulation and testing similar in social and non- social domains? Development of the model: We will move our model from the hand-simulation stage to the running program stage so that we can determine its internal consistency and sufficiency, and so we can explicate several of the component steps that are, at present, described imprecisely.
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1995 — 2003 |
Klahr, David |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Scientific Discovery Processes in Adults and Children @ Carnegie-Mellon University
The primary aim of the proposed research is to advance our knowledge about the development of the psychological processes involved in scientific discovery. The research program is guided by a detailed model of the components of the scientific discovery process. This model characterizes scientific discovery as a problem-process involving search in several problem spaces including the space of hypotheses and the space of experiments. The aim is to identify the developmental trajectory of the processes that execute, constrain and integrate the search. The empirical work includes several studies of how people generate experiments, form and revise hypotheses, evaluate evidence, and collaborate on complex reasoning tasks. Participants include preschoolers, elementary school children, and both science and non- science college students. The theoretical work will elaborate and refine the dual search framework. The research proposed in the current application will have a specific emphasis on the development of evidence evaluation processes. Four interrelated projects are proposed: . Studies of young children's understanding of indeterminacy. This is a fundamental aspect of scientific reasoning. Although preschoolers have a good understanding of the distinction between certain types of determinate and indeterminate patters of evidence, there are others that are extremely resistant to change. The proposed studies will investigate will investigate the nature of this problem. . Studies of elementary school children's learning and transfer of strategies for designing unconfounded experiments. We will explore questions raised in earlier in earlier studies about individual differences in the acquisition and transfer of a basic experimental skill. . Investigation of an important aspect of collaboration in science: the decision to engage or disengage from a collaboration, during the problem solving session. Collaboration is an effective aspect of scientific discovery and although collaborative problem solving has been extensively studied, little is known about the cognitive factors that determine why people decided to work together or apart during their problem solving efforts. Moreover, collaboration requires explicit articulation of one's evidential basis for an argument or belief and may thereby affect the evidence evaluation process. . Revision and extension of our current model of the discovery process. The extended framework will have additional problem spaces that will be used to organized, interpret and integrate the results of these studies.
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2002 — 2008 |
Klahr, David |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Fundamentals of Experimental Science in Early Science Education @ Carnegie-Mellon University
The aim of this project is to investigate the thinking processes of young children and to find out how these processes affect children's ability to learn science in elementary school. The main focus of the research will be on how children learn to design simple experiments and how they understand experimental outcomes so that they can reach conclusions based on hard evidence. Throughout the project, there will be two intertwined strands of effort, lab-based studies and classroom-based studies. The expectation is that results from the lab studies will form the basis for the design of improved curriculum units that are grounded in cognitive theory and that can be implemented within the constraints of real classroom situations. Conversely, the expectation is that the classroom observations and assessments will raise questions that will be studied in the lab. The research will involve several interrelated studies. One will determine whether or not teaching children the basics of experimental design will enable them to understand better the results of others' scientific investigations, for example, other children's science fair posters, or claims they hear about what "scientists have discovered." Another study will investigate children's understanding of various types of error that can occur during the design, setup, execution, and analysis of experiments. The goal is to find out how children react when they see that things don't always turn out exactly the same way when they run the "same" experiment repeatedly. In addition, part of the research will explore the effect of presenting science instruction via a computer interface rather than with a live teacher. One of the studies will examine pre-school children's ability to generate notations for simple procedures that involve sequences of actions. Such an ability is an important precursor to using notation in the science lab.
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