scholarly journals Look again: Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children's use of counterevidence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P Butler
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Causal Beliefs ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Correct Rule ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Initial Hypothesis ◽  
Minimal Evidence

In learning about the world, we must not only make inferences based on minimal evidence, but must deal with conflicting evidence and question those initial inferences when they appear to be wrong. In three experiments (N=96), we found that in some cases young children only revise their causal beliefs when conflicting evidence is explicitly demonstrated for them. Four- and 5-year-old children inferred a rule about what objects had causal powers, and then saw evidence conflicting with that initial inference. Critically, the conflicting evidence was produced either instrumentally and intentionally, or demonstrated communicatively and pedagogically. Only when evidence was explicitly demonstrated for them did children revise their initial hypothesis and use a subtle clue to infer the correct rule.

scholarly journals ‘I was really, really shocked’: A sociological exploration of the transition experiences of English Youth Academy male footballers from school to work

2021 ◽  
pp. 101269022110054
Author(s):  
Nicola Hague ◽  
Graeme Law
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
School To Work ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Professional Experiences ◽  
Transitional Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Types

The world of football arguably brings together and unites people in support of their teams and countries, while inspiring young children and adolescents to dream of a professional career. Existing research in the field has sought to begin to understand what professional footballers experience on their journey through the game. However, much of this UK-based research has focused on first team players and their professional experiences, including transitions from youth team to first team and to retirement. This study, therefore, aimed to examine players during their youth academy scholarship at one English Championship club. This study focused on the transitional experiences of youth players from school to the academy and their resulting embodying of a footballer’s identity. Twelve semi-structured interviews with players aged 17–19, were conducted and then analysed by thematic analysis using figurational sociology concepts. Three different types of transition were identified. Among other reasons, early specialisation in football was a prevalent factor that partly influenced the way the players experienced their transition. The transition into the academy coincided with the transition from youth to adulthood that was arguably anything but linear as players managed the dominant sub-cultures present in the club.

scholarly journals Best interests: The ‘best’ way for courts to decide if young children should act as bone marrow donors?

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shih-Ning Then
Keyword(s):  
Bone Marrow ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Potential Donor ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
Potential Child ◽  
The World ◽  
Psychological Harm ◽  
Continued Use

Young children who are called upon to donate regenerative tissue – most commonly bone marrow – to save the life of a sick relative are in a unique position. The harvest of tissue from them is non-therapeutic and carries the risk of physical and psychological harm. However, paediatric donation is relatively common medical practice around the world. Where some doubt exists over the legality of allowing a child to donate, courts can be asked to authorize the procedure and in doing so will apply the ‘best interests’ test in making their decision. How are a young child’s rights recognized in such a situation? This article considers whether the best interests test is the ‘best’ test to be applied by courts when cases of potential child donors come before it. The approach of courts in three jurisdictions is analysed, and problems in the application of the test in this context are discussed. While the continued use of the test by courts is supported, the way the test has been used by courts is critiqued and recommendations made to better respect the rights of the potential donor child.

scholarly journals The weirdest people in the world?

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 61-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Henrich ◽  
Steven J. Heine ◽  
Ara Norenzayan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Spatial Reasoning ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Behavioral Sciences ◽  
The World ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Behavioral Phenomenon

AbstractBehavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Immigrant Populations and Sanctuary Schools

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 524-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh Patel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Young Children ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Populations ◽  
State Practice ◽  
The World

In the summer months of 2018, the world watched as thousands of young children were separated from their families and detained by immigration officials at the border between the United States and Mexico. On television screens and smartphone updates, it seemed the world collectively gasped at this cruel familial trauma and asked, “what can we do? How can we be in solidarity?” In this essay, I situate this state practice in a long-standing tradition of governance of who has rights and who does not. I also provide specific challenges for material solidarity that reaches beyond media soundbites.

Scientific Reasoning in Young Children: Preschoolers’ Ability to Evaluate Covariation Evidence

2005 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 141-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Koerber ◽  
Beate Sodian ◽  
Claudia Thoermer ◽  
Ulrike Nett
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Children ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
Causal Beliefs ◽  
Prior Belief ◽  
Reasoning Abilities ◽  
Evidence Evaluation ◽  
Basic Understanding

Preschool children’s basic scientific reasoning abilities were investigated in two experiments. Consistent with findings by Ruffman et al. (1993) , Experiment 1 showed that even 4-year-olds can evaluate patterns of covariation evidence. However, even 6-year-olds had difficulties interpreting non-covariation evidence. Experiment 2 showed that 5-year-olds could overcome this difficulty when prompted to expect no causal relationship between two variables. Experiment 2 further showed that preschoolers’ evidence evaluation skills were affected by their pre-existing causal beliefs. However, their performance was above chance even when the evidence contradicted a prior belief they held with some conviction. In sum, our results demonstrate a basic understanding of the hypothesis-evidence relationship in preschool children, thus contributing to a revision of the picture of the scientifically illiterate preschooler.

scholarly journals Argument complexity: Teaching undergrads to make better arguments

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A Kelly ◽  
Robert West
Keyword(s):  
Political Psychology ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Personality Theory ◽  
Integrative Complexity ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Complex Argumentation

The task of turning undergrads into academics requires teaching them to reason about the world in a more complex way. We present the Argument Complexity Scale, a tool for analyzing the complexity of argu-mentation, based on the Integrative Complexity and Conceptual Complexity Scales from, respectively, political psychology and personality theory. Argument Complexity classifies arguments based on acknowl-edgement and consideration of conflicting evidence or conflicting frameworks for judging the issue, use of frameworks for evaluating evidence, and use of meta-frameworks for evaluating frameworks. We discuss how the Argument Complexity Scale can be used to teach undergraduate students to reason and write like academics by providing the scaffolding for forming complex argumentation.

scholarly journals Children being children: the value of an “importance filter”

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr Jonathon Sargeant
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Internal Information ◽  
Processing Mechanism

The perspectives of young children are of considerable interest to the community yet remains largely misunderstood. This paper posits that children demonstrate an optimistic view of the world and the future that is also encased in a deeper understanding of key global, local, and social issues than previously thought. This study challenges the notion that children are either adversely affected by knowledge or ignorant of global issues outside their control. The effects of external media and the reputed social decay of society and the pessimistic worldview reportedly held by young children are questioned. In acknowledging the children’s understanding of key issues, this research identifies that children engage in an internal metacognitive processing of information that allows them to maintain their optimistic view of the world. This paper introduces the concept of an Importance Filter, an internal information processing mechanism that assists children in making sense of their world.

scholarly journals Attentional mechanisms drive systematic exploration in young children

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel J. Blanco ◽  
Vladimir Sloutsky
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Attention Allocation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Distributed Attention ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
The World ◽  
Attentional Mechanisms

Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularlyvaluable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision- making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children. Recent research suggests that a type of systematic exploration predominates in young children’s choices, despite immature control, suggesting that it may be driven by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that young children’s tendency to distribute attention widely promotes elevated exploration, and that interrupting distributed attention allocation through bottom-up attentional capture would also disrupt systematic exploration. We test this hypothesis by manipulating saliency of the options in a simple choice task. Saliency disrupted systematic exploration, thus indicating that attentional mechanisms may drive children’s systematic exploratory behavior. We suggest that both may be part of a larger tendency toward broad information gathering in young children.

scholarly journals The Development of Causal Reasoning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Muentener ◽  
Elizabeth Bonawitz
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Causal Learning ◽  
Causal Relationships ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
The World

Research on the development of causal reasoning has broadly focused on accomplishing two goals: understanding the origins of causal reasoning, and examining how causal reasoning changes with development. This chapter reviews evidence and theory that aim to fulfill both of these objectives. In the first section, it focuses on the research that explores the possible precedents for recognizing causal events in the world, reviewing evidence for three distinct mechanisms in early causal reasoning: physical launching events, agents and their actions, and covariation information. The second portion of the chapter examines the question of how older children learn about specific causal relationships. It focuses on the role of patterns of statistical evidence in guiding learning about causal structure, suggesting that even very young children leverage strong inductive biases with patterns of data to inform their inferences about causal events, and discussing ways in which children’s spontaneous play supports causal learning.

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