Improving Children’s Performance in Scientific Reasoning: The Influences of Individual’s Working Memory Capacity and Cognitive Load during Practice
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Liu, Pei-Pei
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
In self-directed experimentation tasks, participants have to conduct experiments to infer the relationship between variables and a certain effect. Previous research has shown that in this kind of task, children performed worse and progressed less rapidly than adults. There was also large variability among subjects of the same age. Research has also found that participants reasoned less correctly under high working memory load, and that working memory capacity is an important predictor of performance in deductive reasoning tasks. The main objectives of this research are to investigate the relationship between children’s working memory capacity and their scientific reasoning ability, and the possible influence of cognitive load on practice effect. Two groups of sixteen 5th-graders participated in scientific reasoning exercise under high or low cognitive load respectively; their reasoning abilities were measured both before and after the exercise. The results showed that children with greater capacity were more likely to design controlled experiments, and better coordinate their inferences with collected data. In addition, children exercised under lower cognitive load progressed more significantly in scientific reasoning skills. Meanwhile, only individuals with greater capacity progressed significantly through low load practice. The findings suggest that working memory capacity play an important role in children’s performance and development of scientific reasoning, and that lowering cognitive load during practice facilitate children’s improvement.
Subjects
scientific reasoning
cognitive load
working memory capacity
syllogistic reasoning
Type
other
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