Scientific Thinking in Young Children
Gopnik, Alison
Science 337, no. 6102 (2012): 1623-1627
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1223416
“Thirty years ago, the idea that 2-year-olds think like scientists would have seemed absurd. Jean Piaget, the great pioneer of cognitive development, claimed that preschoolers’ thinking was just the opposite of scientific thinking. Preschoolers were irrational, illogical, “precausal,” and limited to the here and now (1). These ideas informed both education and policy.
These claims have turned out to be wrong. Several waves of empirical work have shown that even infants and very young children have intuitive theories of the world around them. More recently, mathematical models of learning have been developed. Empirical research informed by those models shows that early learning is also remarkably similar to scientific induction.
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