Research Expertise and Interest

development, education, cognition, young children’s scientific reasoning, children’s intuitions about rudimentary statistical constructs, data-based inquiry, limitations of young children’s scientific inquiry

Research Description

Kathleen E. Metz is interested in young children’s scientific reasoning, from both developmental and instructional viewpoints. She is also interested in children’s intuitions about rudimentary statistical constructs that are involved in data-based inquiry. She was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Cognitive Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of Bärbel Inhelder’s research team at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. She is currently principal investigator of two NSF projects that are looking into the power and limitations of young children’s scientific inquiry. By designing instruction as optimal as she and her collaborators can engineer, she is finding that children can successfully engage in forms of scientific inquiry much more robust and authentic than that reflected in either contemporary curriculum or curriculum policy recommendations.