This study investigates students' causal beliefs about the relation between certain variables in an electric experiment and seeks to determine the degree to which their tendency to make either idea-based or evidence-based statements about the experiment depends on their having had a prior belief about the causal efficacy of that variable. Fourteen eighth-grade students of both sexes from an initial sample of 49 were presented with experiments and interviewed to determine whether their responses were idea-based or evidence-based, and whether these responses were correlated with the type of prior idea they had held about that variable (causal or noncausal). We found that 34% of all responses were idea-based despite the presentation of physical evidence. We also found that students who had previously thought that a particular variable would not affect the outcome of the experiment (i.e., who had a noncausal idea for that variable) were more likely to make idea-based responses than students who had causal ideas. Furthermore, students tended to make fewer evidence-based responses when evidence was unavailable rather than available.
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Park et al. (1997) studied this question.