| Research Abstract |
When we explain biological and physical phenomena, we make sense of it by activating complex psychological constructs in our explanations. Two experiments we conducted examine the relationships between domain knowledge acquisition and some reasoning schemata in explanations. In Experiment 1, a total of 120 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds and adults were given 4 reasoning problems and justification of yes-no judgments involving familiar phenomena. These problems were embedded in familiar and realistic contexts. In Experiment 2, a total of 90 5 : 0-year-olds, 5 and a half-year-olds and adults solved same types of problems embedded in not only familiar but also unfamiliar contexts and they were asked to explain the judgments in detail given two WH-questions. The results showed (1) that young children's abilities to make inferences were equal to that of the adults, (2) that the children's explanations were flexible and appropriate depending on differentiated domain knowledge and (3) that for children, domain knowledge acquisition promoted the emergence of reasoning schemata as a basis of inductive and deductive inferences, while adults' explanations were divided into two types of styles : highly elaborated through reasoning or simple by rote learning. These results suggest (a) that reasoning schemata would be domain general, (b) that increasing scientific knowledge has a powerful effect on activating the reasoning patterns of induction and deduction. From the findings of classroom discourse research (Watanabe, 1998 ; Takeda, 1999), it was suggested that the discourse styles of explanations are reinforced through exposure to the linguistic input from the classroom's discourse structure.
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