Session Information
SES B 09, Poster Session
Poster Session
Contribution
Reasoning skills are pervasive in our daily lives, but there is still a lack of psychological research in it, especially for children. In current research, there is inadequate research on informal argumentation of children in personally relevant issues. Udell (2007) has shown that examining argument skills in the context of personally relevant issues has higher potential in transference to formal reasoning rather than vice-versa.
Kuhn (1991, 2000) has demonstrated that individuals of different populations (children, adolescents, and adults up to their 60s) who have stronger arguments often display more sophisticated epistemological beliefs. She thus emphasizes the influence of epistemological understanding on the argumentative skills of children. Skilled reasoners employ a ‘critical epistemology’ in which both sides of an issue are examined; in contrast, less skilled reasoners employ a ‘make-sense’ epistemology in which arguments are deemed acceptable if they make intuitive sense, that is, they appear to be true. Kuhn developed a model of epistemology understanding from her work which will be applied and tested in this research study.
In examining children's epistemology and reasoning skills, as children first learn to argue in the context of the family, this study also seeks to bring in the influence of family, in terms of parenting style and communicative practices, on the child's argumentative skills. The dimensions of warmth, structure, control and autonomy-support are used to evaluate parenting style. Parents' epistemology are also tested to investigate the relation of parent's to child's level of epistemological understanding.
The research questions for this study are as follows:
1. How do parenting styles and epistemic beliefs of parents affect communicative practices in the family, and consequently the argumentative competence and epistemological understanding of a child?
2. Does socio-economic status mediate this effect of parenting and contribute to the explanation of variance in child’s competence and understanding?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Kuhn, D., Cheney, R. & Weinstock, M. (2000). The development of epistemological understanding. Cognitive Development, 15, 309-328. Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Udell, W. (2007). Enhancing adolescent girls' argument skills in reasoning about personal and non-personal decisions. Cognitive Development, 22, 341-352.
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