Scientific reasoning abilities are already developing in elementary-school-aged children and enable them to understand the world around them. The goal of the current study was to develop a new instrument for 8- to 10-year-old children in Grades 3 and 4 to measure their understanding of the steps of the "scientific inquiry cycle" (SIC).…

The epistemic trust literature emphasizes that children's evaluations of informants' trustworthiness affects learning, but there is no evidence that epistemic trust affects learning in academic domains. The current study investigated how reliability affects decimal learning. Fourth and fifth graders (N = 122; M[subscript age] = 10.1 years)…

Children and adults rated their own certainty following inductive inferences, deductive inferences, and guesses. Beginning in kindergarten, participants rated deductions as more certain than weak inductions or guesses. Deductions were rated as more certain than strong inductions beginning in Grade 3, and fourth-grade children and adults…

This study investigated children's judgments of the epistemic status of justifications for causal claims. Twenty-six children (14 boys, 12 girls) between the ages of 8 and 10 were asked to help two story characters choose the "best reason" for believing a claim. The reasons included appeals to an authority, to a plausible causal mechanism, or to…

Reading is a complex act mediated by cognitive and sociocultural constructs that include classroom discourse and personal epistemology. This study explored the epistemic beliefs underpinning the discourse of four third-grade, male struggling readers and sought to understand how these beliefs unfolded during the critical-analytic reading…