Preschooler’s Understanding of Knowledge Change Across Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study explored awareness of knowledge change across time in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, and the potential contribution of metacognition and theory of mind to this understanding. Participants’ appreciation of knowledge was measured through the self-knowledge task, metacognition was assessed through the partial-exposure task, and theory of mind was evaluated on Wellman and Liu’s (2004) Theory of Mind scale. I hypothesized that children’s metacognitive awareness and theory of mind would each independently contribute to children’s ability to recognize that their past knowledge is less developed than their current knowledge. Analyses revealed that theory of mind appears to be a better predictor than metacognition for children’s understanding that their knowledge changes over time. Results also showed that performance on all 3 skills improved as age increased. My findings suggest that younger children are still developing the cognitive processes required to fully appreciate that their current knowledge differs from their past knowledge.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".