Belief revision in children: The role of prior knowledge and strategies for generating evidence

Evolving beliefs and reasoning strategies were observed in 22 fifth- and sixth-grade children who worked over 8 weeks for a total of about 5 h on a causal reasoning problem. Children planned, performed, and interpreted experiments to learn about the relations between design features and speed of race cars in a computerized microworld. The group made progress, but by the end of the sessions did not fully understand those features that...