Principle Investigator
Charles Kalish
Chuck’s Blurb
 
 
http://corundum.education.wisc.edu/
Graduate Students
Laura Scheinholtz: Concepts of Prevention
Sunae Kim: Ownership Rights
Our willingness to make predictions about future events is often based on the regularity of past events. My dissertation investigates the development of induction across contexts where evidence is more absolute or certain (e.g., all have red blood) and cases in which evidence is highly likely (e.g., most animals move). I am asking how the magnitude of evidence affects the types of inferences people are willing to make. Do children reason about different kinds of evidence the same way as adults? This study involves three experiments, each including a training set and projection task. During training participants are told about a property of 20 individual animals. In some cases all animals have the same property (absolute evidence; 20 robins all have the same kind of blood), in other cases some have different properties (probabilistic evidence: 20 robins, most of which have the same bone-type). Participants are then asked to make predictions about other animals; what type of blood will they have? Preliminary results suggest that adults are influenced by the similarity between animals; the less similar an animal is to a robin, the less likely it has the same kind of blood. For children the type of evidence has a huge impact on the types of inferences they will make. When given evidence that an entire class of animals shares a property (absolute evidence), children’s predictions follow the same similarity-based trend as adults. However, for probabilistic evidence, children reserve their predictions for highly specific instances (projecting properties only to other robins). One implication from these results is that children may think that in some cases they are learning about a category (“if this property is only sometimes true, it must be specific to this kind of thing”) and in other cases they are learning about a property (“if this property is always true, it must be something about this property”).
 
As a fourth-year graduate student in the Educational Psychology department at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, my primary interest is in children’s developing conceptions of the inside of the body and healthy habits.  With mounting concern for the health of children in America and the world over, especially in areas like nutrition, exercise and obesity, knowledge of how children understand such phenomena needs to be at the forefront of research and education.  Furthermore, medical science’s growing understanding of various types of illness and disease demand ever more public vigilance and understanding of causation, symptoms, contagion and prevention.
Currently, I am examining young children’s emerging concepts of illness and other health risk prevention.  What methods do 4 – 8 year olds see as feasible for preventing catching a cold, injuring a muscle or gaining weight?  Prior research has shown that certain positive health behaviors, like eating a balanced diet, are deemed effective as healthy activities by children, but emerging results paint a more complex picture.  Children not only recognize behaviors that are healthy across the board, but they distinguish between appropriate behaviors according to the situation at hand.  As this line of research continues, clear implications for health curriculum development in education will become apparent.
I’m from Seoul, Korea. I graduated from Ewha Womans University (the right name, grammatical error is on purpose of the founder I guess) majored in English literature and linguistics. I realized I enjoy reading novels rather than analyzing them. Also, linguistic parts were always too much dry for me. How did I get interested in children’s thinking? Well…my past experiences were diverse and the interest has been always changing but I had a continued interest in children, especially, how children acquire language mostly about artifacts. My past interest, before I came to this graduate school, was about how adults or siblings influences children’s learning a new word and applying it in different circumstances.
As a third year graduate student, my current research interest is looking at how children understand an artifact concept- how to use an artifact and to name it. Recently literature shows that a person who made an object determines artifact identity. This led me to think artifact kind concept along with ownership right that is obviously related to an object-what you are allowed to do with an object. Would children differentiate different ownership rights about different actions that one can take with an object? What story does this tell to the children’s understanding of artifact concept?
Undergraduate Students
Craig’s blurb