The Journey From Child to Scientist: Integrating Cognitive Development and the Education Sciences

All of us are said to have a set of folk sciences: intuitive ways of understanding the world in areas such as biology, physical mechanics, and psychology. In addition, these folk sciences are thought to have deep and interesting similarities to the formal sciences. Both are usually described as having coherence and internal consistency, as well as specifying certain foundational or ontological kinds as the critical entities of concern (Carey, 1985; Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996). Folk and formal sciences also have important interrelations through the course of development and education. Thus, children come to appreciate some aspects of formal science as taught to them in the classroom in terms of both changing some of the misconceptions of their folk sciences and better appreciating methods and forms of reasoning used in the formal sciences. In this chapter, my focus is on the ways in which naïve understandings of the world change in the elementary school years. How is the folk science of a 5-year-old, if there is one at all, different from that of a 10-year-old, or an adult? In what ways do aspects of the formal sciences come to exert influences on folk sciences in developed cultures? I argue that recent research on how we understand the mental representations of concepts and the nature of explanatory understanding also suggest new ways of thinking about what folk science is, how it develops, and how it is related to the more formal sciences. I also argue that without such a new view of what changes, it might seem that not much at all develops in the area of folk scientific understanding. Traditionally, cognitive development, intuitive theories—and, by implication, the folk sciences—have often been conceived in ways that emphasized the child as an individual trying to make sense of the world on his own. The child is confronted either with natural phenomena or complex artifacts and then deciphers, as best he can, how things work. Cognitive scientists vary considerably in their views of how this process might work, with views ranging from constructivist and information-processing accounts of the child entertaining a series of ever-more-accurate explicit hypotheses to more behaviorist and dynamic systems views of a child acquiring information in a more associative manner than may occur without any explicit hypotheses at all. Some version of these views clearly has merit, because children do learn something about the world around them in terms of grasping its causal patterns; however, a problem with all these developmental accounts arises when one considers the adult end state. When construed as detailed mechanistic models of how the world works, folk science in the vast majority of adults seems to be an abysmal failure. If adults