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**Chapter 4** 

© 2012 Morris et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**The Emergence of Scientific Reasoning** 

individual reasoning and collaborative cognition (Feist, 2006, p. ix).

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/53885

**1. Introduction** 

contextual factors.

Klahr, 1999; Kuhn, 1989; Zimmerman, 2007).

Bradley J. Morris, Steve Croker, Amy M. Masnick and Corinne Zimmerman

*Scientific reasoning* encompasses the reasoning and problem-solving skills involved in generating, testing and revising hypotheses or theories, and in the case of fully developed skills, reflecting on the process of knowledge acquisition and knowledge change that results from such inquiry activities. Science, as a cultural institution, represents a "hallmark intellectual achievement of the human species" and these achievements are driven by both

Our goal in this chapter is to describe how young children build from their natural curiosity about their world to having the skills for systematically observing, predicting, and understanding that world. We suggest that scientific reasoning is a specific type of intentional information seeking, one that shares basic reasoning mechanisms and motivation with other types of information seeking (Kuhn, 2011a). For example, curiosity is a critical motivational component that underlies information seeking (Jirout & Klahr, 2012), yet only in scientific reasoning is curiosity sated by deliberate data collection and formal analysis of evidence. In this way, scientific reasoning differs from other types of information seeking in that it requires additional cognitive resources as well as an integration of cultural tools. To that end, we provide an overview of how scientific reasoning emerges from the interaction between internal factors (e.g., cognitive and metacognitive development) and cultural and

The current state of empirical research on scientific reasoning presents seemingly contradictory conclusions. Young children are sometimes deemed "little scientists" because they appear to have abilities that are used in formal scientific reasoning (e.g., causal reasoning; Gopnik et al., 2004). At the same time, many studies show that older children (and sometimes adults) have difficulties with scientific reasoning. For example, children have difficulty in systematically designing controlled experiments, in drawing appropriate conclusions based on evidence, and in interpreting evidence (e.g., Croker, 2012; Chen &

