Effects of Reception and Discovery Instruction on Kindergarteners’ Performance on Probability Tasks

Abstract

Seventy-two kindergarteners participated in an instructional session (involving a reception, discovery, or control condition) and then took two immediate and two delayed (3 weeks) criterion tests, all of the tasks being concerned with simple probability events. Both a prediction and an explanation measure were used. Evidence for the superiority of discovery learning was not forthcoming. In the case of both the reception and discovery groups, prediction performance on the two criterion tests identical in type to the instructional task was consistently superior to that on the two criterion tests differing in type from the training task. Significant instructional condition prediction effects occurred predominantly, though not exclusively, in the criterion tests identical in type to the training task.