Heated ideological debates over climate change, vaccines and the origins of species have revealed fault lines between religious and scientific explanations for natural phenomena. These divisions pose challenges for science educators who need to develop ways to reach students whose reasoning includes religious concepts. Such questions are particularly pressing for public school educators who teach children being raised in evangelical Christian faiths, a faith which comprises over one-fourth of the nation’s adults (Pew Center, 2015). My project aims to better understand how children raised in evangelical Christian families learn to navigate scientific and religious systems of reasoning. My project uses parent-child conversations and child interviews to investigate this issue through two questions:
(1.) How do evangelical Christian children navigate between religious and scientific reasoning at different points in their development?
(2.) How do parent-child conversations guide children in this process?
By understanding children’s religious reasoning development, its relation to their scientific concepts and parental supports for children’s reasoning at home, we can develop curricula that better scaffold children’s science learning in schools, while further elucidating the social processes of children’s causal reasoning development.
Theoretical Background
Early models of children’s reasoning suggested that scientific reasoning replaces religious reasoning over the course of development, but recent studies have challenged this view. Findings of these studies have led to a new model of reasoning, one in which apparently contradictory ideas, such as science and religion, can “coexist” within individuals’ reasoning (Legare et al., 2012). The next step is to understand how different forms of coexistence develop. It is likely that children first use religious and scientific concepts side-by-side, as two separate lines of reasoning but later come to integrate them (Legare et al., 2012). Further, the development of coexistence is supported by children’s epistemologies (i.e. their certainty and evaluation of knowledge) (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997). While some argue that science and religion represent opposing epistemologies (Sinatra & Nadelson, 2008), recent studies suggest that students hold similar epistemologies of science and religion (e.g., Shtulman, 2013).
Both scientific and religious reasoning require extensive social support for their development. In particular, children use the testimony they hear from adults to construct scientific and religious concepts (Harris & Koenig, 2006; Robinson & Einav, 2014). However, few studies have examined actual child-adult interactions (Callanan et al., 2012), and most studies focus on explicit testimony, overlooking the myriad of ways that inter-individual interactionsimplicitly convey coexistence and epistemic information about science and religion (cf. Duranti et al., 2011).
Methodological Approach
My project uses a multi-level approach to capture the dynamic relation between individual psychological development and inter-individual socialization in cultural context (McLean & Syed, 2016; Miller et al., 2012; Rogoff, 2003). Specifically, I use children’s responses to hypothetical vignettes to assess individual child reasoning and parent-child conversations to assess inter-individual socialization. I situate these methods in a cross-sectional study design that employs qualitative and quantitative analyses of data.
I am recruiting 30 fifth-graders, 30 ninth-graders and their parents from evangelical Christian church congregations. For both individual child interviews and parent-child conversations, participants respond to a series of hypothetical vignettes about natural events and people with diverging views on scientific, religious and moral issues (following, for example, Kuhn et al., 2000; Woolley et al., 2011). Vignettes are followed by questions that probe causal reasoning (e.g., “Why did this happen?”) and epistemic understanding (e.g., “How do you know?” “Can both people be right?”).
For the child interview data, I will use the three forms of coexistence (“synthetic,” “target-dependent” and “integrative”), outlined by Legare et al. (2012), to assess how children navigate between scientific and religious concepts at different points in development. Parent-child conversations will be analyzed using qualitative analyses because qualitative analyses can capture the dynamics of process (McLean & Syed, 2016). Specifically, I will conduct close, micro-analyses of conversations (DiBianca Fasoli, 2017) that examine each conversational turn to identify how parents and children use scientific and religious concepts to respond to one another (e.g., to align, counter, justify, explain, warn) and whether and how scientific and religious concepts commonly co-occur together. I will also examine the participant roles that children assume (e.g., as author, speaker, listener), since participant roles are a key way that epistemic information is implicitly conveyed through conversation (Miller et al., 2012).
Significance of the Research
Historically, religious reasoning has been a “blind spot” in developmental psychology (Callanan, 2014). Given that many children’s thinking is embedded in religious contexts, my project will expand developmental theories to capture this human phenomenon. Further, the notion that apparently contradictory ideas, such as science and religion, can coexist within individuals’ reasoning needs to be explored. My project puts this issue front and center. Finally, we have thousands of studies on children’s reasoning development but only a handful on the social processes of that development. The unique advantages of my project are that it connects children’s coexistence reasoning to inter-individual reasoning contexts and can reveal precisely how these inter-individual contexts implicitly support children’s coexistence development. Findings will advance understanding of the social processes of children’s reasoning development and can help educators bridge students’ scientific reasoning across family and school contexts.
References
Callanan, M. A. (2014). Diversity in children’s understanding of death. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 79(1), 142-150.
Callanan, M., Rigney, J., Nolan-Reyes, C., & Solis, G. (2012). Beyond pedagogy: How children’s knowledge develops in the context of everyday parent-child conversations. In A. Pinkham, T. Kaefer, & S. Neuman (Eds.), Knowledge development in early childhood: How young children build knowledge and why it matters (pp. 52-70). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
DiBianca Fasoli, A. (2017). From autonomy to divinity: The cultural socialization of moral reasoning in an evangelical Christian community. Child Development (early view). doi:10.1111/cdev.12811
Duranti, A., Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (2012). The handbook of language socialization. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Harris, P. L., & Koenig, M. (2006). Trust in testimony: How children learn about science and religion. Child Development, 77, 505-524.
Hofer, B. K., & Pintrich, P. R. (1997). The development of epistemological theories: Beliefs about knowledge and knowing and their relation to learning. Review of Educational Research, 67(1), 88-140.
Kuhn, D., Cheney, R., & Weinstock, M. (2000). The developmental of epistemological understanding. Cognitive Development, 15(3), 309-328.
Legare, C. H., Evans, E. M., Rosengren, K., & Harris, P. (2012). The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations across cultures and development. Child Development, 83, 173-185.
Miller, P. J., Fung, H., Lin, S., Chen, E. C.-H., & Boldt, B. R. (2012). How socialization happens on the ground: Narrative practices as alternate socializing pathways in Taiwanese and European-American families. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 77, 1-140.
McLean, K. C., & Syed, M. (2016). Personal, master, and alternative narratives: An integrative framework for understanding identity development in context. Human Development, 58, 318-349
Pew Center. (2015). America’s changing religious landscape. Retrieved from https://www.pewforum.org/files/2015/05/RLS-08-26-full-report.pdfopens in new window
Robinson, E., & Einav, S. (2014). Trust and skepticism: Children’s selective learning from testimony. Cambridge, UK: Psychology Press.
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press.
Shtulman, A. (2013). Epistemic similarities between students’ scientific and supernatural beliefs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105, 199-212.
Sinatra, G. M., & Nadelson, L. S. (2011). Science and religion: Opposite ends of core epistemological continua? In R. Taylor & M. Ferrari (Eds.), Epistemology and science education: Understanding the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy (pp. 173-194). New York, NY: Routledge.
Woolley, J. D., Cornelius, C. A., & Lacy, W. (2011). Developmental changes in the use of supernatural explanations for unusual events. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 11, 311-337.