Learning science concepts through prompts to consider alternative possible worlds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated whether prompting children to think counterfactually when learning a complex science concept (planetary habitability) would promote their learning and transfer. In Study 1, children (N = 102 6- and 7-year-olds) were either prompted to think counterfactually about Earth (e.g., whether it is closer to or farther from the sun) or prompted to think about examples of different planets (Venus and Neptune) during an illustrated tutorial. A control group did not receive the tutorial. Children in the counterfactual and examples groups showed better comprehension and transfer of the concept than those in the control group. Moreover, children who were prompted to think counterfactually showed some evidence of better transfer to a novel planetary system than those who were prompted to think about different examples. In Study 2, we investigated the nature of the counterfactual benefit observed in Study 1. Children (N = 70 6- and 7-year-olds) received a tutorial featuring a novel (imaginary) planet and were either prompted to think counterfactually about the planet or prompted to think about examples of additional novel planets. Performance was equivalent across conditions and was better than performance in the control condition on all measures. The results suggest that prompts to think about alternative possibilities-both in the form of counterfactuals and in the form of alternative possible worlds-are a promising pedagogical tool for promoting abstract learning of complex science concepts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".