This set of papers relates to my interest in the psychology of scientific discovery. These studies started in the mid-80s (Shrager & Klahr, 1986)
when we began to study how people form mental models of complex devices. We soon realized that what we were observing was the scientific
reasoning process, and we did several studies with adults and children trying to better understand different aspects of this complex form of human problem
solving. This work is summarized in Klahr, 2000, and a broader view of various approaches to studying scientific discovery can be found in Klahr & Simon (1999).
You can download running versions (for either Macs or Pcs) of the "discovery microworlds" used in this research, by clicking here:
Shrager, J., & Klahr, D. (1986). Instructionless learning about a complex device. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 25, 153-189.
Klahr, D., & Dunbar, K. (1988). Dual space search during scientific reasoning. Cognitive Science, 12(1), 1-48
Klahr, D. & Dunbar, K. (1989). Developmental differences in scientific discovery processes. In Klahr, D., & Kotovsky, K. (Eds.), Complex information processing: The impact of Herbert A. Simon. Hillsdale , NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 109-143.
Klahr, D., Dunbar, K. & Fay, A.L. (1990). Designing good experiments to test `bad' hypotheses. In J. Shrager & P. Langley (Eds.), Computational models of discovery and theory formation . San Mateo , CA : Morgan-Kaufman. pp 355-402.
Okada, T., & Klahr, D. (1991). Searching an Hypothesis When Reasoning About Buoyant Forces: The effect of feedback. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Schunn, C. D., & Klahr, D. (1992). Complexity management in a discovery task. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Klahr, D., Fay, A.L., & Dunbar , K. (1993) Developmental differences in experimental heuristics. Cognitive Psychology, 25, 111-146
Schunn, C. D. & Klahr, D. (1993) Self vs. Other-generated hypotheses in scientific discovery. Proceedings of Fifteenth Annual Meetings of Cognitive Science Society
Klahr, D. (1994) Children, adults, and machines as discovery systems Machine Learning , 14, 313-320.
Schunn, C. D., & Klahr, D. (1995). A 4-space model of scientific discovery. In Proceedings of the 17th
Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Fay, A. & Klahr, D. (1996) Knowing about guessing and guessing about knowing: Preschoolers' understanding of indeterminacy . Child Development, 67, 689-716.
Klahr, D. (1996) Scientific Discovery Processes in Children, Adults, and Machines In D. Steier & T. Mitchell, Eds., Mind Matters: Contributions to Cognitive and Computer Science in Honor of Allen Newell Hillsdale , N.J. : Erlbaum.
Penner, D. E., & Klahr, D. (1996). When to trust the data: Further investigations of system error in a scientific reasoning task . Memory & Cognition, 24 (5), 655-668.
Penner, D. E., & Klahr, D. (1996). The interaction of domain-specific knowledge and domain-general discovery stategies: A study with sinking objects. Child development, 67, 2709-2727.
Schunn, C. D., & Klahr, D. (1996). The problem of problem spaces: When and how to go beyond
a 2-space model of scientific discovery. In the Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society.
Klahr, D. & Simon, H. A. (1999) Studies of Scientific Discovery: Complementary Approaches and Convergent Findings . Psychological Bulletin, 125 (5), 524-543.
Klahr, D. (2000) Exploring Science: The Cognition and Development of Discovery Processes . Cambridge , MA :MIT Press
For reviews of this book, click here
Klahr, D. & Chen, Z. (2003) Overcoming the positive-capture strategy in young children: Learning about indeterminacy. Child Development , 74 (5), 1256-1277.
Triona, L. & Klahr, D. (2007) A New Framework for Understanding How Young Children Create External Representations for Puzzles and Problems. In E. Teubal, J. Dockrell., & L. Tolchinsky (Eds.), Notational Knowledge: Developmental and Historical Perspectives. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers
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