Question-asking is a crucial tool for acquiring information about unseen entities, such as viruses; thus, examining children’s questions within the context of COVID-19 is particularly important for understanding children’s learning about the …
The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has had a disproportionate impact on Black, low-income, and elderly individuals. We recruited 175 predominantly white children ages 5–12 and their parents (N = 112) and asked which of two individuals …
Prior work has shown that many undergraduate students have misconceptions about genetic inheritance, even after they take genetics courses. Visual representations, such as pedigree diagrams, are commonly used in genetics instruction, and they help …
The term “disability” encompasses many conditions (including a range of learning, intellectual, physical, sensory and socioemotional disorders) that can be caused by a variety of genetic, environmental, and unknown factors. We examine how children …
We investigated children’s reasoning about genetic inheritance. We found that 4- to 12-year-old children have a fairly good understanding of how genetic inheritance works, but they reliably have two misunderstandings. The first one is that if the two parents have the same eye color (let's say dark brown) they think that it is more likely for the offspring to have a similar color (dark orange) than a different color (green). The second one is that they think that if the parents have different eye colors, they think that female offspring are more likely to resemble the mother and male offspring are more likely to resemble the father.
When encountered with a novel illness, children often ask for information about the illness and its impact on health from their parents. Although prior studies have explored how parents generally described the coronavirus to their children, there is …
We investigated how exposure to different diagrammatic features influences the features that undergraduate features prefer and include in diagrams that they make. We found that students preferred and drew features that they were exposed to.
We investigated adults’ reasoning about genetic inheritance. We found that adults have a fairly good understanding of how genetic inheritance works, but they reliably have two misunderstandings. The first one is that if the two parents have the same eye color (let's say dark brown) they think that it is more likely for the offspring to have a similar color (dark orange) than a different color (green). The second one is that they think that if the parents have different eye colors, they think that female offspring are more likely to resemble the mother and male offspring are more likely to resemble the father.
We examined whether the perceptual richness of a diagram influences children's learning and transfer of knowledge about metamorphosis. First and second graders who saw the rich diagram during the lesson learned more than those who saw the bland diagram during the lesson. Fourth and fifth graders who saw the bland diagram during the lesson incorrectly transferred more than those who saw the rich diagram during the lesson.
We asked parents to report the questions that their children asked the about the COVID-19 pandemic and how they responded. We found that children were more likely to ask questions about lifestyle changes, rather than about the virus. Parents often answered these questions and provided realistic explanations. Parents often discussed changes in social norms, their social responsibility to stop the spread of the virus, and tried to comfort their child. Thus, parent-child conversations about the pandemic might influence how children think about illness and social norm, and children's coping skills.