ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the ways young children in the Young Children As Researchers (YCAR) project based decisions on evidence during their everyday activities at home and in their early childhood settings and by doing so, engaged in research behaviour identified as important by academics. The etymology for the word decision is in the Latin verb decidere, from caedere meaning to cut and de-, meaning off, so that its literal meaning is to cut off. Decision-making and reasoning are correlated mental processes and decisions are made through a combination of complex and unobservable mental processes. The word evidence derives from the Latin evidens, a conflation of ex- and videre, meaning apparent. Evidentialism is the moral duty to proportion one's beliefs to evidence. Children in the YCAR project sometimes based decisions on evidence in the context of applying their prior experiences to new situations. Children's behaviours sometimes indicated their uses of evidence from prior experiences to develop and apply mental models.
