Chuck Kalish is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His research focuses on the development of inductive inference and causal reasoning, seeking to answer the question: How do children predict the future and learn from experience? One line of work focuses on how children notice patterns in data. This research draws on general theories of statistical learning and categorization. Another line of research explores the role of norms in social cognition. How does children's understanding of rules and obligations develop, and what role does such understanding play in predicting and explaining people's behavior? 

The ability to generalize past experience to new situations, to make inductive inferences, is central to what we think of as learning. We want children not just to be able to solve familiar problems, but also to know how to apply their knowledge in new circumstances. Chuck hopes that studying the process of generalization will tell us more about how children learn.

Contact Information

Current Projects

Promoting Discriminative and Generative Learning: Transfer in Arithmetic Problem Solving

Understanding and Cultivating the Connections Between Students' Natural Ways of Reasoning and Mathematical Ways of Reasoning

Completed Projects