85-752 Development of Scientific Thinking

Units: 9.0 Department: Psychology Special permission: Yes Cross-listed: 85-352 Related URLs: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/ This seminar will address the following question: What are the cognitive processes that underlie scientific thinking and how do they develop? The psychological literature addressing this issue can be organized into several broad, overlapping categories: 1. Studies of children and adults' domain-specific knowledge about scientific topics. 2. Studies of children and adults' domain-general skills and knowledge about scientific reasoning processes. 3. Demonstrations of the conditions under which people fail to perform according to optimal norms of good science, including: confirmation bias misperception and misencoding of phenomena preservation on disconfirmed hypotheses inadequate experimental design faulty probabilistic calculations. We will discuss and evaluate a wide variety of papers addressing these topics, within a general framework that views scientific reasoning as search in multiple problem spaces. The course will be run as a mixed undergraduate/graduate seminar. All participants will be expected to read a few papers each week, and be prepared to discuss them in class. Classes will be a mix of lectures, discussions, and reports of on going research by the participants. In addition, most participants will design and begin to carry out projects related to this course. GRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY.

Popularity index Rank for this semester: #0 Rank in this department: #0

Spring 2005 times

No sections available for semester Spring 2005.