The Pendulum pp 363-376 | Cite as

Roles of Abductive Reasoning and Prior Belief in Children’s Generation of Hypotheses about Pendulum Motion

  • Yong-Ju Kwon
  • Jin-Su Jeong
  • Yun-Bok Park
Chapter

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that student’s abductive reasoning skills play an important role in the generation of hypotheses on pendulum motion tasks. To test the hypothesis, a hypothesis-generating test on pendulum motion, and a prior-belief test about pendulum motion were developed and administered to a sample of 5th grade children. A significant number of subjects who have prior belief about the length to alter pendulum motion failed to apply their prior belief to generate a hypothesis on a swing task. These results suggest that students’ failure in hypothesis generation was related to abductive reasoning ability, rather than simple lack of prior belief. This study, then, supports the notion that abductive reasoning ability beyond prior belief plays an important role in the process of hypothesis generation. This study suggests that science education should provide teaching about abductive reasoning as well as scientific declarative knowledge for developing children’s hypothesis-generation skills.

Keywords

Prior Belief Declarative Knowledge Pendulum Motion Abductive Reasoning Belief Group 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer 2005

Authors and Affiliations

  • Yong-Ju Kwon
    • 1
  • Jin-Su Jeong
    • 1
  • Yun-Bok Park
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Biology EducationKorea National University of EducationCheongwonThe Republic of Korea

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