Verbal information, or testimony, from learning partners (e.g., parents, teachers) initially serves as one of young children’s primary sources of information beyond direct observation. An extensive body of research has examined children’s burgeoning abilities to evaluate testimony according to cues about the source’s credibility (e.g., Mills, 2013). However, as children grow and develop, they gain increased access to knowledge artifacts, or objects or records containing knowledge such as books or Internet resources (e.g., Einav, Robinson, & Fox, 2013; McGinty et al., 2006; Noles, Danovitch, & Shafto, 2015) that often provide little information about their source (Corriveau et al., 2014; Eyden et al., 2013; Robinson, Einav, & Fox, 2013). Across six studies, I investigated factors influencing young children’s developing abilities to epistemically evaluate knowledge artifacts and the potential role that artifacts’ media, source, and type may play in those evaluations. In Study 1, I examined how media preferences may impact four- to six-year-old children’s trust in information, evaluating the reliability of early reading ability and other factors as predictors for their text-trust preferences and examining whether informant methodology affects these findings. I found that many children display a consistent text-trust preference but that it is likely due to inferences about the epistemic authority of text rather than early reading ability, inferences about puppet or human informants, or other factors. In Study 2, I explored whether four- to six-year-old children use the knowledge of a source author to make inferences about knowledge artifacts and whether media (text or audio) influences these decisions, finding that children’s text-trust preferences are likely more general knowledge artifact preferences and influence their decisions independently of their burgeoning understanding of authors’ knowledge. In Study 3, I developed adult and child surveys to examine children’s usage of and epistemic practices regarding different types of knowledge artifacts and other information sources. Here, I found that parents and children largely agreed on children’s varying usage of various knowledge artifacts and other sources and generally believe most types of artifacts are potential learning avenues for children. The final chapter of this dissertation reviews the theoretical and practical significance of these findings and discusses directions for future investigation using the knowledge artifact framework. / 2024-05-09T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44405 |
| Date | 09 May 2022 |
| Creators | Chandler-Campbell, Ian L. |
| Contributors | Corriveau, Kathleen |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ |
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