Deena Skolnick Weisberg
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1660797 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Deena Skolnick Weisberg |
| PRENOMES | Deena Skolnick |
| SOBRENOME | Weisberg |
| ASSINATURA | WEISBERG D S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Villanova University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4000-4941 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 20 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 20 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Possible reasons for reductive seductions
Water woes
Encouraging individuals, especially children, to decrease their use of natural resources is critical to creating sustainable communities. We thus investigated whether children could learn conservation strategies from an educational TV show. We measured 4- and-5-year-olds’ (N = 110) knowledge, self-efficacy, and environmental worry before and after showing them an episode of the PBS show Nature Cat that either did or did not teach about water cons…
Should the cat in the hat keep talking like that? Educational correlates of anthropomorphism in children's science media
What does the Cat in the Hat know about that? An analysis of the educational and unrealistic content of children’s narrative science media
Relations between children's exploration in a children's museum and their reflections about their exploration
We examined 6- to 9-year-olds' (N = 60, 35 girls, 34% White, 23% Hispanic, 2% Black/African American, 2% Asian/Asian American, 22% Mixed Ethnicity/Race, 17% Unavailable, collected April–September 2019 in Providence, RI, USA) first-person perspectives on their exploration of museum exhibits. We coded goal setting, goal completion, and behaviors that reflected changes to how goals were accomplished. Whether children played collaboratively related t…
A comparative study of the acceptance and understanding of evolution between China and the US
Prior work has found that Americans’ views on evolution are significantly and positively related to their understanding of this theory. However, whether this relationship is cross-culturally robust is unknown. This article extends earlier work by measuring and comparing the acceptance and understanding of evolution among highly educated individuals in China and the United States. We find a significantly higher evolution acceptance level in the Ch…
Constructing Science
Knowledge about the nature of science increases public acceptance of science regardless of identity factors
While people’s views about science are related to identity factors (e.g. political orientation) and to knowledge of scientific theories, knowledge about how science works in general also plays an important role. To test this claim, we administered two detailed assessments about the practices of science to a demographically representative sample of the US public ( N = 1500), along with questions about the acceptance of evolution, climate change, a…
A Case of Sustained Internal Contradiction
Many people feel the pull of both creationism and evolution as explanations for the origin of species, despite the direct contradiction. Some respond by endorsing theistic evolution, integrating the scientific and religious explanations by positing that God initiated or guided the process of evolution. Others, however, simultaneously endorse both evolution and creationism despite the contradiction. Here, we illustrate this puzzling phenomenon wit…
The interplay between moral actions and moral judgments in children and adults
The language of play
The youngest readers’ dilemma
Guided Play
Competing trends in early childhood education emphasize the need for strong curricular approaches and for unfettered exploration. We propose an approach to early learning that avoids this false dichotomy: guided play. Guided play takes advantage of children’s natural abilities to learn through play by allowing them to express their autonomy within a prepared environment and with adult scaffolding. We provide examples of how guided-play situations…
Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication
< .001, d = 0.21. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others' cognitive and emotional states. Kidd and Castano (2013) received a great deal of attention by providing support for this claim. Their article reported that reading segments of literary fiction (but …
How Fictional Worlds Are Created
Both adults and children have the ability to not only think about reality but also use their imaginations and create fictional worlds. This article describes the process by which world creation happens, drawing from philosophical and psychological treatments of this issue. First, world creators recognize the need to create a fictional world, as when starting a pretend game or opening a novel. Then, creators merge some real-world knowledge with th…
Guided Play
Decades of research demonstrate that a strong curricular approach to preschool education is important for later developmental outcomes. Although these findings have often been used to support the implementation of educational programs based on direct instruction, we argue that guided play approaches can be equally effective at delivering content and are more developmentally appropriate in their focus on child‐centered exploration. Guided play lie…
Young Children are Reality-Prone When Thinking about Stories
Many parents and some researchers assume that young children are fantastical thinkers. We examined this assumption in the domain of reasoning about fictional stories. We presented 4-year-olds with realistic and fantastical stories and asked them how best to continue these stories: with ordinary events or with events that violate real-world causal laws. Children preferred the ordinary events for both types of stories (Experiment 1, n=42) while a c…
Embracing complexity
Lillard et al. (2013) concluded that pretend play is not causally related to child outcomes and charged that the field is subject to a play ethos, whereby research is tainted by a bias to find positive effects of play on child development. In this commentary, we embrace their call for a more solidly scientific approach to questions in this important area of study while offering 2 critiques of their analysis. First, we urge researchers to take a m…
What Belongs in a Fictional World
How do readers create representations of fictional worlds from texts? We hypothesize that readers use the real world as a starting point and investigate how much and which types of real-world information is imported into a given fictional world. We presented subjects (N=52) with three stories and asked them to judge whether real world facts held true in the story world. Subjects' responses indicated that they imported many facts into fiction, tho…
The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of p…
The language of play
Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication
< .001, d = 0.21. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others' cognitive and emotional states. Kidd and Castano (2013) received a great deal of attention by providing support for this claim. Their article reported that reading segments of literary fiction (but …
What Belongs in a Fictional World
How do readers create representations of fictional worlds from texts? We hypothesize that readers use the real world as a starting point and investigate how much and which types of real-world information is imported into a given fictional world. We presented subjects (N=52) with three stories and asked them to judge whether real world facts held true in the story world. Subjects' responses indicated that they imported many facts into fiction, tho…
Young Children are Reality-Prone When Thinking about Stories
Many parents and some researchers assume that young children are fantastical thinkers. We examined this assumption in the domain of reasoning about fictional stories. We presented 4-year-olds with realistic and fantastical stories and asked them how best to continue these stories: with ordinary events or with events that violate real-world causal laws. Children preferred the ordinary events for both types of stories (Experiment 1, n=42) while a c…
How Fictional Worlds Are Created
Both adults and children have the ability to not only think about reality but also use their imaginations and create fictional worlds. This article describes the process by which world creation happens, drawing from philosophical and psychological treatments of this issue. First, world creators recognize the need to create a fictional world, as when starting a pretend game or opening a novel. Then, creators merge some real-world knowledge with th…
Embracing complexity
Lillard et al. (2013) concluded that pretend play is not causally related to child outcomes and charged that the field is subject to a play ethos, whereby research is tainted by a bias to find positive effects of play on child development. In this commentary, we embrace their call for a more solidly scientific approach to questions in this important area of study while offering 2 critiques of their analysis. First, we urge researchers to take a m…
The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of p…
What Belongs in a Fictional World
How do readers create representations of fictional worlds from texts? We hypothesize that readers use the real world as a starting point and investigate how much and which types of real-world information is imported into a given fictional world. We presented subjects (N=52) with three stories and asked them to judge whether real world facts held true in the story world. Subjects' responses indicated that they imported many facts into fiction, tho…
Guided Play
Decades of research demonstrate that a strong curricular approach to preschool education is important for later developmental outcomes. Although these findings have often been used to support the implementation of educational programs based on direct instruction, we argue that guided play approaches can be equally effective at delivering content and are more developmentally appropriate in their focus on child‐centered exploration. Guided play lie…
Young Children are Reality-Prone When Thinking about Stories
Many parents and some researchers assume that young children are fantastical thinkers. We examined this assumption in the domain of reasoning about fictional stories. We presented 4-year-olds with realistic and fantastical stories and asked them how best to continue these stories: with ordinary events or with events that violate real-world causal laws. Children preferred the ordinary events for both types of stories (Experiment 1, n=42) while a c…
Embracing complexity
Lillard et al. (2013) concluded that pretend play is not causally related to child outcomes and charged that the field is subject to a play ethos, whereby research is tainted by a bias to find positive effects of play on child development. In this commentary, we embrace their call for a more solidly scientific approach to questions in this important area of study while offering 2 critiques of their analysis. First, we urge researchers to take a m…
Guided Play
Competing trends in early childhood education emphasize the need for strong curricular approaches and for unfettered exploration. We propose an approach to early learning that avoids this false dichotomy: guided play. Guided play takes advantage of children’s natural abilities to learn through play by allowing them to express their autonomy within a prepared environment and with adult scaffolding. We provide examples of how guided-play situations…
Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication
< .001, d = 0.21. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others' cognitive and emotional states. Kidd and Castano (2013) received a great deal of attention by providing support for this claim. Their article reported that reading segments of literary fiction (but …
How Fictional Worlds Are Created
Both adults and children have the ability to not only think about reality but also use their imaginations and create fictional worlds. This article describes the process by which world creation happens, drawing from philosophical and psychological treatments of this issue. First, world creators recognize the need to create a fictional world, as when starting a pretend game or opening a novel. Then, creators merge some real-world knowledge with th…
The youngest readers’ dilemma
The interplay between moral actions and moral judgments in children and adults
The language of play
A Case of Sustained Internal Contradiction
Many people feel the pull of both creationism and evolution as explanations for the origin of species, despite the direct contradiction. Some respond by endorsing theistic evolution, integrating the scientific and religious explanations by positing that God initiated or guided the process of evolution. Others, however, simultaneously endorse both evolution and creationism despite the contradiction. Here, we illustrate this puzzling phenomenon wit…
Knowledge about the nature of science increases public acceptance of science regardless of identity factors
While people’s views about science are related to identity factors (e.g. political orientation) and to knowledge of scientific theories, knowledge about how science works in general also plays an important role. To test this claim, we administered two detailed assessments about the practices of science to a demographically representative sample of the US public ( N = 1500), along with questions about the acceptance of evolution, climate change, a…
Relations between children's exploration in a children's museum and their reflections about their exploration
We examined 6- to 9-year-olds' (N = 60, 35 girls, 34% White, 23% Hispanic, 2% Black/African American, 2% Asian/Asian American, 22% Mixed Ethnicity/Race, 17% Unavailable, collected April–September 2019 in Providence, RI, USA) first-person perspectives on their exploration of museum exhibits. We coded goal setting, goal completion, and behaviors that reflected changes to how goals were accomplished. Whether children played collaboratively related t…
A comparative study of the acceptance and understanding of evolution between China and the US
Prior work has found that Americans’ views on evolution are significantly and positively related to their understanding of this theory. However, whether this relationship is cross-culturally robust is unknown. This article extends earlier work by measuring and comparing the acceptance and understanding of evolution among highly educated individuals in China and the United States. We find a significantly higher evolution acceptance level in the Ch…
Constructing Science
What does the Cat in the Hat know about that? An analysis of the educational and unrealistic content of children’s narrative science media
Should the cat in the hat keep talking like that? Educational correlates of anthropomorphism in children's science media
Possible reasons for reductive seductions
Water woes
Encouraging individuals, especially children, to decrease their use of natural resources is critical to creating sustainable communities. We thus investigated whether children could learn conservation strategies from an educational TV show. We measured 4- and-5-year-olds’ (N = 110) knowledge, self-efficacy, and environmental worry before and after showing them an episode of the PBS show Nature Cat that either did or did not teach about water cons…
Psychology (17 obras) · Child Development and Digital Technology (9 obras) · Epistemology (8 obras) · Sociology (7 obras) · Developmental psychology (6 obras) · Political science (6 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (5 obras) · Law (5 obras) · Media Influence and Health (5 obras) · Social Psychology (5 obras)