背景:儿童早期和中期的问题解决与认知发展研究和教育支持高度相关。以前对科学问题解决的研究集中在儿童处理具有挑战性任务的过程和策略上,但更少的是提供对能够解决科学问题的认知网络的见解。
目的:在本研究中,我们旨在调查科学问题解决的性能是否主要由特定领域的规则知识决定,按领域-一般认知能力或两者兼而有之。
方法:在我们的研究中,215名6至8岁的儿童完成了一组三个特定领域的规则知识任务和三个内容一致的相应问题解决任务,以及词汇任务,和推理任务。
结果:相关分析和回归分析显示,特定领域的规则知识对相应的问题解决任务的影响可以忽略不计。相比之下,不同领域的问题解决绩效之间的关联以及问题解决绩效与领域通用能力(词汇和推理)之间的关联相当强。
结论:研究结果表明,小学儿童的科学问题解决主要依赖于领域-一般认知能力。关于认知理论和早期科学教育,讨论了这些发现的含义。
BACKGROUND: Problem-solving in early and middle childhood is of high relevance for cognitive developmental research and educational support. Previous research on science problem-solving has focussed on the process and strategies of children handling challenging tasks, but less on providing insights into the cognitive network that enables science problem-solving.
OBJECTIVE: In this study, we aimed to investigate whether performance in science problem-solving is mainly determined by domain-specific rule knowledge, by domain-general cognitive abilities or both.
METHODS: In our study, 215 6- to 8-year-old children completed a set of three domain-specific rule knowledge tasks and three corresponding problem-solving tasks that were content-coherent, as well as a vocabulary task, and a reasoning task.
RESULTS: Correlational and regression analyses revealed a negligible impact of domain-specific rule knowledge on corresponding problem-solving tasks. In contrast, the associations between problem-solving performance in different domains and the associations between problem-solving performance and domain-general abilities (vocabulary and reasoning) were comparably strong.
CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that science problem-solving in primary school children primarily relies on domain-general cognitive abilities. Implications of these findings are discussed with regard to cognitive theories and early science education.