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Effects of Students' Prior Knowledge on Scientific Reasoning in Density  

Yang, II-Ho (Korea National University of Education)
Kwon, Yong-Ju (Korea National University of Education)
Kim, Young-Shin (Korea National University of Education)
Jang, Myoung-Duk (Korea National University of Education)
Jeong, Jin-Woo (Korea National University of Education)
Park, Kuk-Tae (Korea National University of Education)
Publication Information
Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education / v.22, no.2, 2002 , pp. 314-335 More about this Journal
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of students' prior knowledge on scientific reasoning process performing a task of controlling variables with computer simulation and to identify a number of problems that students encounter in scientific discovery. Subjects for this study included 60 Korean students: 27 fifth-grade students from an elementary school; 33 seventh-grade students from a middle school. The sinking objects task involving multivariable causal inference was used. The task was presented as computer simulation. The fifth and seventh-grade students participated individually. A subject was interviewed individually while the investigating a scientific reasoning task. Interviews were videotaped for subsequent analysis. The results of this study indicated that students' prior knowledge had a strong effect on students' experimental intent; the majority of participants focused largely on demonstrating their prior knowledge or their current hypothesis. In addition, studnets' theories that were part of one's prior knowledge had significant impact on formulating hypotheses, testing hypothesis, evaluating evidence, and revising hypothesis. This study suggested that students' performance was characterized by tendencies to generate uninformative experiments, to make conclusion based on inconclusive or insufficient evidence, to ignore, reject, or reinterpret data inconsistent with their prior knowledge, to focus on causal factors and ignore noncausal factors, to have difficulty disconfirming prior knowledge, to have confirmation bias and inference bias (anchoring bias).
Keywords
prior knowledge; scientific reasoning; testing hypothesis; evaluating evidence;
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