How can you tell they’ve got it: Changing Your Mind with Evidence?

If they’ve got it, you’ll see things like: belief revision in children research (PMC 2020); hypothesis testing and argumentation from evidence in young children. Or just try it together: If your child predicts what will happen in an experiment and gets a different result, do they accept the evidence rather than deciding the experiment must have gone wrong?

Science Scientific Inquiry Ages 6–8

Changing Your Mind with Evidence

Your child can change their mind when a result surprises them. If the test does not match their guess, they trust the evidence rather than say the test went wrong.

In curriculum terms

Be willing to change your mind when evidence doesn't support your prediction — a result that surprises you is more valuable than one that confirms what you already thought

Ages are typical, not deadlines — follow your child’s pace. How to help at home →

How to tell they’ve got it

Tick these off as you see them — no test required.

belief revision in children research (PMC 2020)
hypothesis testing and argumentation from evidence in young children

🖨 Print this page to keep the checklist — it prints beautifully.

Try this together

If your child predicts what will happen in an experiment and gets a different result, do they accept the evidence rather than deciding the experiment must have gone wrong?

Where this sits on the map

Stuck here? Check the skills it builds on first. Confident? Here’s what it unlocks.

Builds on

Observation vs Interpretationages 6–7Being willing to revise a hypothesis requires first distinguishing observation from interpretation — you can only update your interpretation if you recognise it as separate from the data

Learning from Mistakesages 8–9Changing your mind when evidence contradicts your prediction is the science form of the universal error-analysis habit — treating surprises as information rather than failures

Changing Your Mind with Evidencethis skill · ages 6–8

Unlocks

Could there be another explanation?ages 7–9Actively seeking alternative explanations requires first having the habit of not defending your original interpretation against the evidence

solid = must come firstdashed = helps

Curriculum alignment

Where this fits in the official school curriculum — our best automated guess, not yet checked by a person.

Show candidate curriculum codes · 3 ACARA · 1 VIC

Australian Curriculum v9 candidate

AC9S2I05low confidenceYear 2 · Science inquiry

compare observations with predictions and others’ observations, consider if investigations are fair and identify further questions with guidance

AC9S1I05low confidenceYear 1 · Science inquiry

compare observations with predictions and others’ observations, consider if investigations are fair and identify further questions with guidance

AC9S3I05low confidenceYear 3 · Science inquiry

compare findings with those of others, consider if investigations were fair, identify questions for further investigation and draw conclusions

Victorian Curriculum 2.0 codes & levels only

VC2S4I01low confidenceScience · Levels 3 and 4 · Science Inquiry strand

These are candidate alignments generated by semantic matching — machine-suggested and unreviewed (v0.1), not official or verified mappings. For official curriculum content see australiancurriculum.edu.au, curriculum.nsw.edu.au and f10.vcaa.vic.edu.au. Don’t rely on them for registration or compliance purposes.

Nearby on the map

Observation vs Interpretationages 6–7 Asking scientific questionsages 5–8 Classifying living thingsages 7–9 Comparing Design Solutionsages 5–8

All Scientific Inquiry skills →