ON THE COMPLEX RELATION BETWEEN COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH AND CHILDRENS SCIENCE CURRICULA

My earlier article (Metz, 1995) identified several assumptions about e lementary school children's scientific reasoning abilities that have f requently been used for the purpose of framing ''developmentally appro priate'' science curricula. That article traced the origin of those as sumptions to an interpretation of a segment of Piaget's writings and t hen critiqued those assumptions of the basis of Piaget's corpus, as we ll as the contemporary cognitive developmental research literature. Gi ven that developmental research constituted the primary base on which I critiqued these assumptions and formulated alternative recommendatio ns, I am surprised by Deanna Kuhn's (1997) contention that the article could be read as suggesting that the developmental literature has ''f ailed'' science educators and that they would be advised to look elsew here to inform their curricular design. Nevertheless, I do consider th e relation between cognitive developmental research, as embodied in th e contemporary research tradition, and children's science curricula as fundamentally complex. This essay examines three interrelated charact eristics of the cognitive developmental research tradition that contri bute to the complexity of this relationship: (a) its tendency to attri bute shortcomings in performance to the child's stage, with the assump tion that these shortcomings will disappear with sufficient advancemen t of cognitive development; (b) the frequent confounding of weak knowl edge with developmentally based cognitive deficiencies; and (c) the em phasis of robust stage-based constraints on children's thinking, to th e neglect of variability and change.