The cognitive consequences of conflict: harnessing disagreement to foster STEM learning in early childhood

• Applicant: Antonia Langenhoff
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 559588410

Disagreement has many faces: While irreconcilable disagreements can be uncomfortable, frustrating, and increase polarization, productive disagreements can move science and societies forward. On the individual level, disagreeing with peers can sometimes be anxiety-provoking or even demoralizing; on the other hand, prior research suggests that empirical disagreement about factual matters can foster critical thinking and STEM learning. Thus, disagreement plays an important role in science and has potential as a pedagogical tool in science education, but we still lack a systematic understanding of whether, how, and when disagreement fosters learning. The current proposal aims to address these questions by examining the effect of disagreement on curiosity, evidence generation, and learning in 4- to 7-year-old children. Key Objective 1 is to extend prior findings by systematically examining the beneficial effect of empirical disagreement, not just on learning outcomes but also on key learning mechanisms crucial to STEM education: information-search (Study 1), exploration (Study 2), and hypothesis-testing (Study 3). Each study assesses the effect of disagreement on learning in distinct STEM domains: Life Science, Engineering, and Physical Science. Across all three studies, the effect of empirical disagreement is compared against agreement (consensus) and two other forms of conflicting viewpoints (subjective disagreement and competing hypotheses). Key Objective 2 is to better understand how the learner’s social environment might reduce or even reverse the benefit of disagreement on learning, by examining a factor particularly salient in STEM classrooms: reputational concerns, such as the learner’s desire to "appear smart" or "avoid being wrong in front of others". By combining the same paradigms as in Aim 1 with well-established methods to elicit reputational concerns in young learners, three studies investigate how the social context modulates the effect of disagreement on children’s information-search (Study 4), exploration (Study 5), and hypothesis-testing (Study 6). Together, the proposed research has the potential to inform us both about how disagreement fosters STEM learning by prompting learners’ curiosity and evidence-generation, and how disagreement might hinder learning by revealing the role of social context. These findings will enhance our scientific understanding of the social-cognitive mechanisms underlying both the positive and negative effects of disagreement on STEM learning, and develop theory-based, empirically-tested principles for implementing disagreement effectively in formal and informal learning environments.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professorin Hyowon Gweon, Ph.D.