Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examined whether embedding explanations in guided activities promotes conceptual change about a physicalscience concept. One common misconception that children have is that heavy objects fall at a faster rate than light ones.We used a pre-, post-, and delay test design to address this misconception. Forty 5-year-old children were assigned to oneof two conditions: a guided play activity that included an explanation about gravity, or the same guided play activity butwith no explanation provided. Childrens explanations improved immediately at post-test (p =.001, 95% CI [0.58, 2.33])and after a one-week delay test (p ¡.001, 95% CI [1.23, 2.95]) when the explanation about gravity was embedded in theactivity. There was no improvement at post-test (p =.36) or delay-test (p =.93) when children completed the activity only.This study shows that conceptually rich explanations are an effective pedagogical tool for promoting belief revision inchildren.