| Though hypothesizing about the world is a constant and pervasive activity, some literature suggests that people have considerable trouble reasoning about hypotheses in scientific reasoning tasks. People's problems have been interpreted as stemming from conceptual deficits that prevent them from holding evidence and theory in their proper relation (Kuhn 1992). However, other research suggests that people's performance, may stem not from conceptual deficits, but from misunderstanding the kind of thinking that is expected (Donaldson, 1978). Norms for thinking in science establish that explanations should be precise, detailed, and formal. However, norms associated with everyday contexts establish that explanations should be simple, concise, and informal. This presents a problem for the existing literature, since it is unclear whether people always know the norms that apply in experimental tasks. The studies reported here made context information explicit, making it possible to examine the reasoning norms that people apply to scientific and non-scientific contexts. Children aged 7 to 8 and 10 to 12 and adults were asked to generate and evaluate explanations for a variety of phenomena---in social and biological/physical domains---that lend themselves to both informal and formal explanations. I hypothesized that adults would utilize more scientific explanation features in the scientific condition than the everyday. In addition, I predicted that some features of scientific explanations would apply to some domains but not others. Children were expected to display only a few aspects of scientific thinking, having not yet acquired all the norms of interest. Results suggest that adults, and to a lesser extent, children do subscribe to different reasoning norms for the two contexts and that they alter their explanations to fit both context and domain. Biological/physical topics were found to support more aspects of scientific thinking than did social, which children seemed to discount as a science topic. Finally, the results suggest that people engage in scientific reasoning only when cued. Thus, unless people are provided information about how they should think, researchers cannot be certain the kind of thinking their tasks elicited. |
