The origins of hypothesis testing: Young children’s developing understanding of information seeking compared to effect production

ABSTRACT

Understanding that hypothesis testing is aimed at seeking information rather than producing desirable outcomes is indispensable for designing informative experiments. This study investigated the developmental course of information seeking compared to producing an effect in young children. In a between-subjects design, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 109) were presented with the same pattern of events and asked to choose an intervention to either seek information on whether a hypothesis is right or produce an effect. The results revealed a developmental change between 4 and 6 years of age. From 5.5 years and onwards, children selectively chose the correct interventions in both conditions, whereas 4- and younger 5-year-olds did not. Contrary to the general view that producing desirable outcomes developmentally precedes engaging in information seeking, the present findings indicate that they follow a similar developmental line in the early childhood years.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific reasoning
• causal learning
• hypothesis testing
• information seeking
• experimentation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that supports the findings of this study are openly available at Open Science Framework via the following link: https://osf.io/drqwk/?view_only=db6678e06c3c4a28b75a9768932eba98

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2023.2212901.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the German Research Council (https://www.dfg.de/, Grant SO 213/34-1) and by the REASON program, Elite Network of Bavaria (https://www.elitenetzwerk.bayern.de/, Project K-GS-2012-209). We are grateful to the staff and children of various kindergartens in Munich for participating in this research and for their friendly cooperation. We also thank the anonymous reviewer for their many helpful comments.