Kevin Crowley

Parents Explain More Often to Boys Than to Girls During Shared Scientific Thinking

Young childrens everyday scientific thinking often occurs in the context of parent-child interactions. In a study of naturally occurring family conversation, parents were three times more likely to explain science to boys than to girls while using interactive science exhibits in a museum. This difference in explanation occurred despite the fact that parents were equally likely to talk to their male and female children about how to use the exhibits and about the evidence generated by the exhibits. The findings suggest that parents engaged in informal science activities with their children may be unintentionally contributing to a gender gap in childrens scientific literacy well before children encounter formal science instruction in grade school.

From Everyday to Scientific Observation: How Children Learn to Observe the Biologist’s World

This article explores the development of observation in scientific and everyday contexts. Fundamental to all scientific activity, expert observation is a complex practice that requires the coordination of disciplinary knowledge, theory, and habits of attention. On the surface, observation appears to be a simple skill. Consequently, children may be directed to observe, compare, and describe phenomena without adequate disciplinary context or support, and so fail to gain deeper scientific understanding. Drawing upon a review of science education, developmental psychology, and the science studies literatures, this article examines what it means to observe within a disciplinary framework. In addition, everyday observers are characterized and a framework is proposed that hypothesizes how everyday observers could develop practices that are more like scientific observers.

Constraints on Learning in Nonprivileged Domains.

Constraints on learning, rather than being unique to evolutionarily privileged domains, may operate in nonprivileged domains as well. Understanding of the goals that strategies must meet seems to play an especially important role in these domains in constraining the strategies that are generated and in allowing children to evaluate strategies even before they use them. The present experiments showed that children can use their conceptual understanding to accurately evaluate strategies that they not only do not yet use but that are more conceptually advanced than the strategies they do use. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds who did not yet use the min strategy for adding numbers judged it to be smarter than an equally novel illegitimate strategy, and to be just as smart as their typical strategy of counting from one. In Experiment 2, 9-year-olds who did not yet use the forking strategy to play tic-tac-toe judged it to be even smarter than their own win/block approach. The results demonstrated a large number of commonalities between the functioning of constraints in privileged and nonprivileged domains, as well as suggesting some possible differences.

Explanation and Generalization in Young Children's Strategy Learning.

Children often learn new problem-solving strategies by observing examples of other peoples problem-solving. When children learn a new strategy through observation and also explain the new strategy to themselves, they generalize the strategy more widely than children who learn a new strategy but do not explain. We tested three hypothesized mechanisms through which explanations might facilitate strategy generalization: more accurate recall of the new strategys procedures; increased selection of the new strategy over competing strategies; or more effective management of the new strategys goal structure. Findings supported the third mechanism: Explanations facilitated generalization through the creation of novel goal structures that enabled children to persist in use of the new strategy despite potential interference from competing strategies. The facilitative effect of explanation did vary with childrens age and did not vary between explanations children created by themselves versus explanations they learned from the experimenter.

The Robotic Autonomy Mobile Robotics Course: Robot Design, Curriculum Design and Educational Assessment

Robotic Autonomy is a seven-week, hands-on introduction to robotics designed for high school students. The course presents a broad survey of robotics, beginning with mechanism and electronics and ending with robot behavior, navigation and remote teleoperation. During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to twenty eight students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (Moffett Field, CA). The educational robot and course curriculum were the result of a ground-up design effort chartered to develop an effective and low-cost robot for secondary level education and home use. Cooperation between Carnegie Mellons Robotics Institute, Gogoco, LLC. and Acroname Inc. yielded notable innovations including a fast-build robot construction kit, indoor/outdoor terrainability, CMOS vision-centered sensing, back-EMF motor speed control and a Java-based robot programming interface. In conjunction with robot and curriculum design, the authors at the Robotics Institute and the University of Pittsburghs Learning Research and Development Center planned a methodology for evaluating the educational efficacy of Robotic Autonomy, implementing both formative and summative evaluations of progress as well as an in-depth, one week ethnography to identify micro-genetic mechanisms of learning that would inform the broader evaluation. This article describes the robot and curriculum design processes and then the educational analysis methodology and statistically significant results, demonstrating the positive impact of Robotic Autonomy on student learning well beyond the boundaries of specific technical concepts in robotics.

Describing and Supporting Collaborative Scientific Thinking in Parent-Child Interactions

project between two developmental psychologists and the staff of Childrens Discovery Museum of San Jose. Under the broad agenda of studying the development of scientific literacy, we have been exploring the hypothesis that the guidance of parents is an important bridge between the intentions of the exhibit designer and the experience and knowledge of the child. Our research is guided by a framework inspired by a combination of sociocultural and infor-

Flexible Strategy Use in Young Children's Tic‐Tac‐Toe

Abstract In domains with multiple competing goals, people face a basic challenge: How to make their strategy use flexible enough to deal with shifting circumstances without losing track of their overall objectives. This article examines how young children meet this challenge in one such domain, tic-tac-toe. Experiment 1 provides an overview of development in the area; it indicates that childrens tic-tac-toe strategies are rule based and that new rules are added one at a time. Experiment 2 demonstrates that even young children flexibly tailor their strategy use to meet shifting circumstances. Experiment 3 indicates that these adaptations are accomplished through a process of goal-based resource allocation, whereby children focus their cognitive resources on applying rules most consistent with their current primary goal. A computer simulation specifies how this process works and demonstrates its sufficiency for producing behavior much like that of the children. The findings are discussed as part of a broader framework of mechanisms for generating problem-solving approaches.

Formal measures of learning in a secondary school mobile robotics course

During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to thirty students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (Moffett Field, CA). The authors at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Robotics Institute and at the University of Pittsburghs Learning Research and Development Center planned a methodology for formally evaluating the educational efficacy of Robotic Autonomy. This article describes the educational analysis methodology and the statistically significant results of our analysis, demonstrating the positive impact of Robotic Autonomy on student learning beyond the boundaries of specific technical concepts in robotics. Educational robotics is gaining traction at all levels of the educational system, however formal analysis of its effectiveness has been lacking. This research project seeks to address this weakness by presenting statistically significant evidence of broad learning.

The Growth of Multidisciplinarity in the Cognitive Science Society

In a case study of the growth of cognitive science, we analyzed the activities of the Cognitive Science Society with a particular emphasis on the multidisciplinary nature of the field. Analyses of departmental affiliations, training back-grounds, research methodology, and paper citations suggest that the journal Cognitive Science and the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society are dominated by cognitive psychology and computer science, rather than being an equal division among the constituent disciplines of cognitive science. However, at many levels, a growing percentage of work was found to involve a conjunction of multiple disciplines, such that approximately 30–50% of recent work in the Cognitive Science Society is multidisciplinary. In a questionnaire study of cognitive scientists involved in collaborative research, multidisciplinarity was found to shape the research process and affect the factors associated with successful research.

Learning in Context Digital Games and Young Black Men

The authors present an exploratory study of Black middle school boys who play digital games. The study was conducted through observations and interviews with Black American middle school boys about digital games as an informal learning experience. The first goal of the study is to understand the cultural context that Black students from economically disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods bring to playing digital games. The second goal of the study is to examine how this cultural context affects the learning opportunities with games. Third, the authors examine how differences in game play are potential factors in the discrepancy between White male gamers and Black male gamers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Finally, the authors address several opportunities within the field of informal learning to augment game play by bridging the learning that takes place within game play to the real world.