Charles W. Kalish - US grants

This project supports a workshop on the topic of how children come to understand norms, rules, and obligations: a social cognition of norms. The workshop will bring together scholars who are leaders in the fields of moral development and theory of mind. While moral development research has, over the last 20 years, documented the richness of children's knowledge of principles of justice, fairness, and rights, only recently have moral development researchers started asking how children's psychological understandings inform their moral thinking. During the same time period, there has been an extensive research program on children's knowledge about others' psychological states, referred to as "theory of mind". Parallel to the new directions in moral development research, an emerging direction for theory of mind research is exploring the relation between normative and psychological construals of human action. Surprisingly, there has been little collaboration between researchers on children's moral development and researchers on children's theory of mind, despite the extensive lines of research in these two respective areas and the potential conceptual overlaps. The charge of this workshop will be to explore how those perspectives together generate a deeper understanding of the social cognition of normative relations. If the goal is to develop a full account of how children develop the abilities to use and form norms, rules, permissions, and obligations, what are the key concepts and distinctions? The challenge is to define a field of reasoning about norms, and to encourage researchers to view existing questions in this new light.

Learning from experience is one of the most basic and important cognitive problems, for both adults and, especially, for young children. Much of this learning takes the form of conditional probability judgments: judging what outcomes are likely given some evidence. This project explores the development of such conditional probability judgments. Specifically, how do children use examples they know about to make predictions about unfamiliar cases? The significance of some examples depend on 1) which population one is concerned about (e.g., the conditional one is assessing) and 2) the population sampled from (e.g., how the evidence was generated). Asking how and when children are sensitive to differences in conditionals and sampling addresses longstanding debates about the role of inferential and similarity-based processes in cognitive development. The results of this work will illustrate ways in which basic similarity models must be elaborated to account for children's conditional judgments. In addition, a developmental perspective is critical for understanding why adults do or do not adequately account for conditionals and sampling in their judgments. Finally, conditional probability judgments are just such a basic feature of cognition that understanding their development is central to a wide range of psychological phenomena and theories.

Understanding how children make conditional probability judgments is important for a number of social and educational concerns. For example, stereotyping often involves a failure or bias in conditional judgment. From evidence that students who commit school shootings are likely to have played violent video games, people often, erroneously, conclude that students who play violent video games are likely to commit school shootings. This project will allow us to better understand the conditions under which children form stereotypes, and provide guidance for efforts to reduce stereotyping. The reasoning abilities explored in this project are also critical in educational contexts, especially for scientific reasoning. The logic of experimental design and hypothesis testing is based on conditional probability, including ideas about sampling and implications of evidence. Conditional probability judgments are involved when interpreting statistical claims in the media and in public policy debates. By understanding how children approach conditional probability judgments we will be able to design more effective instruction to improve scientific literacy.

Learning patterns from exposure to examples is a basic cognitive process and an important focus of early STEM education. It is because we know many patterns that we can make predictions about new instances: Will a goat bleat? Will it eat tin cans? Children learn about patterns in many different ways and in many different contexts (e.g., at home, in school, in museums). The goal of this project is to understand how different contexts of exposure lead to different forms of pattern learning. For example, children may learn a single pattern really well given a clear task and corrective feedback, but learn only that one pattern. If all a child is asked to do is sort animals into a pile of "bleaters" and "non-bleaters," he or she will get good at distinguishing goats from sheep, but will not learn anything more about animals. In more exploratory contexts (e.g., free-sorting or free-play) children may learn multiple patterns at the same time, but perhaps not learn any one pattern really well. A child may notice lots of things about the various animals encountered at a petting zoo, including "irrelevant patterns" (the goats are mostly brown), but may not notice complex patterns or become adept at using any particular pattern to make predictions (e.g., telling the goats from the sheep). The specific idea motivating this study is a the prediction of a theoretical tradeoff in learning between focus and flexibility. Empirical research explores this tradeoff and the conditions that lead to more or less focused and flexible learning.

The central goal of the project is to understand how different contexts dispose children to different kinds of learning. The project combines laboratory experiments with exhibit design in the Madison Children's Museum (MCM). The results will help educators develop complementary experiences, using different learning contexts to achieve different goals. Sometimes we want to teach children to be very focused and efficient at responding to a particular pattern: If they see a whale, they should think "mammal." Other times we want to provide children with a broad exposure to many different patterns: If asked whether whales are more similar to cows or to sharks, a student should be able to draw on different dimensions of comparison. This project will help educators design instruction that produces both focused and flexible learning. Work at the MCM will contribute directly to design of exhibits. Results will be shared with academic audiences, communities of museum professionals, and with the general public. Communicating research findings with patrons of the museum will help influence the kinds of informal learning opportunities parents provide to their young children. Finally, information about how parents and educators can support pattern learning disseminated through the museum will reach the diverse community served by MCM.