•Question-asking is a powerful learning strategy but is relatively understudied.•The ability to ask questions is present in infancy but undergoes rapid development.•We introduce a framework for ...understanding question asking in childhood.
Children’s ability to query others is remarkable because it attests to their coordination of a range of complex cognitive capacities and because it allows them to initiate and redirect pedagogical exchanges. It is therefore a catalyst for their ability to learn from others. However, despite its importance for cognitive developmental theorizing and its implications for educational practice, relative to other aspects of children’s exploratory behavior, research on children’s questions has been relatively sparse and siloed across several disciplines. The aim of this review is to provide a framework for organizing past and future research on question-asking and to use this framework to describe what development and variability in children’s question asking looks like between infancy and the elementary school years. We propose that question-asking can be divided into four components: (1) initiation, (2) formulation, (3) expression, and (4) response evaluation and follow-up. Drawing on research from the fields of psychology, education, and developmental psycholinguistics we review what is known and not known about these four components between infancy and elementary school as well as describe sources of variability across development.
Background
Despite the importance of understanding the mechanism of natural selection for both academic success and everyday decision-making, this concept is one of the most challenging to learn in ...contemporary science. In addition to cumulative socio-cultural influences, intuitive cognitive biases such as the teleological bias—the early developing tendency to explain phenomena in terms of function or purpose—contribute to the difficulty of accurate learning when the process is taught in high school or later. In this work, we therefore investigate—for the first time—the viability of a teacher-led classroom-based storybook intervention for teaching natural selection in early elementary school. The intervention was designed to counteract teleological explanations of adaptation. In consequence, we specifically examined the nature and extent of elementary school children’s teleological reasoning about biological trait change before and after this intervention.
Results
Second and third grade students demonstrated a variety of misunderstandings at pretest, including teleological preconceptions. Most of these teleological ideas were explicitly accompanied by incorrect mechanistic ideas, confirming that the teleological reasoning observed in this young sample reflected fundamental misunderstandings of adaptation as a goal-directed event. Overall, learning from the classroom intervention was substantial, with students performing significantly better on all measures of natural selection understanding at posttest. Interestingly, explicit teleological reasoning displayed at the pretest did not have a differentially greater impact on learning than other kinds of marked pretest misunderstandings. One explanation for this might be that children displaying teleological misunderstandings at pretest also tended to demonstrate more biological factual knowledge than other students. Another explanation might be that pretest misunderstandings that were not overtly teleological were, nevertheless, implicitly teleological due to the nature of the mechanisms that they referenced. The differential impact of teleological preconceptions on learning might therefore have been underestimated.
Conclusions
In summary, early elementary school children show substantial abilities to accurately learn natural selection from a limited but scalable classroom-based storybook intervention. While children often display explicit teleological preconceptions, it is unclear whether these ideas represent greater impediments to learning about adaptation than other substantial misunderstandings. Reasons for this, and limitations of the present research, are discussed.
Health behaviors that do not effectively prevent disease can negatively impact psychological wellbeing and potentially drain motivations to engage in more effective behavior, potentially creating ...higher health risk. Despite this, studies linking "moral foundations" (i.e., concerns about harm, fairness, purity, authority, ingroup, and/or liberty) to health behaviors have generally been limited to a narrow range of behaviors, specifically effective ones. We therefore explored the degree to which moral foundations predicted a wider range of not only effective but ineffective (overreactive) preventative behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, participants from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States reported their engagement in these preventative behaviors and completed a COVID-specific adaptation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire during the pandemic peak. While differences occurred across countries, authority considerations consistently predicted increased engagement in both effective preventative behaviors but also ineffective overreactions, even when controlling for political ideology. By contrast, purity and liberty considerations reduced intentions to engage in effective behaviors like vaccination but had no effect on ineffective behaviors. Study 2 revealed that the influence of moral foundations on U.S participants' behavior remained stable 5-months later, after the pandemic peak. These findings demonstrate that the impact of moral foundations on preventative behaviors is similar across a range of western democracies, and that recommendations by authorities can have unexpected consequences in terms of promoting ineffective-and potentially damaging-overreactive behaviors. The findings underscore the importance of moral concerns for the design of health interventions that selectively promote effective preventative behavior.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Prior research with preschool children has established that dialogic or active book reading is an effective method for expanding young children's vocabulary. In this exploratory study, we asked ...whether similar benefits are observed when a robot engages in dialogic reading with preschoolers. Given the established effectiveness of active reading, we also asked whether this effectiveness was critically dependent on the expressive characteristics of the robot. For approximately half the children, the robot's active reading was expressive; the robot's voice included a wide range of intonation and emotion (
). For the remaining children, the robot read and conversed with a flat voice, which sounded similar to a classic text-to-speech engine and had little dynamic range (
). The robot's movements were kept constant across conditions. We performed a verification study using Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) to confirm that the
robot was viewed as significantly more expressive, more emotional, and less passive than the
robot. We invited 45 preschoolers with an average age of 5 years who were either English Language Learners (ELL), bilingual, or native English speakers to engage in the reading task with the robot. The robot narrated a story from a picture book, using active reading techniques and including a set of target vocabulary words in the narration. Children were post-tested on the vocabulary words and were also asked to retell the story to a puppet. A subset of 34 children performed a second story retelling 4-6 weeks later. Children reported liking and learning from the robot a similar amount in the
and
conditions. However, as compared to children in the
condition, children in the
condition were more concentrated and engaged as indexed by their facial expressions; they emulated the robot's story more in their story retells; and they told longer stories during their delayed retelling. Furthermore, children who responded to the robot's active reading questions were more likely to correctly identify the target vocabulary words in the
condition than in the
condition. Taken together, these results suggest that children may benefit more from the expressive robot than from the flat robot.
Questioning others is one of the most powerful methods that children use to learn about the world. How does questioning develop? How is it socialized? And how can questioning be leveraged to support ...learning and education? In this volume, some of the world's leading experts are brought together to explore critical issues in the development of questioning. By collecting interdisciplinary and international perspectives from psychology and education, "The Questioning Child" presents research from a variety of distinct methodological and theoretical backgrounds. It synthesizes current knowledge on the role of question-asking in cognitive development and charts a path forward for researchers and educators to understand the pivotal function that questioning plays in child development and education. This book: (1) Includes contributions from interdisciplinary researchers in psychology and education; (2) Features theoretical and empirical investigations that represent state-of-the-art research in the field; and (3) Provides a comprehensive framework for understanding this area of research. This book contains the following chapters: (1) Questions about questions: framing the key issues (Lucas Payne Butler, Samuel Ronfard, and Kathleen H. Corriveau); (2) Questions in development (Peter Carruthers); (3) The point, the shrug, and the question of clarification (Paul L. Harris); (4) The quest for comprehension and learning: children's questions drive both (Henry M. Wellman); (5) Children's question-asking across cultural communities (Maureen Callanan, Graciela Solis, Claudia Castañeda, and Jennifer Jipson); (6) The development of information-requesting gestures in infancy and their role in shaping learning outcomes (Kelsey Lucca); (7) Developmental changes in question asking (Angela Jones, Nora Swaboda, and Azzurra Ruggeri); (8) Understanding developmental and individual differences in the process of inquiry during the preschool years (Candice M. Mills and Kaitlin R. Sands); (9) 'Why are there big squares and little squares?' How questions reveal children's understanding of a domain (Dave Neale, Caroline Morano, Brian N. Verdine, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek); (10) Children's questions in social and cultural perspective (Mary Gauvain and Robert L. Munroe); (11) Mothers' use of questions and children's learning and language development (Imac Maria Zambrana, Tone Kristine Hermansen, and Meredith L. Rowe); (12) Teaching and learning by questioning (Deanna Kuhn, Anahid S. Modrek, and William A. Sandoval); (13) Asking 'why?' and 'what if?' The influence of questions on children's inferences (Caren M. Walker and Angela Nyhout); (14) What makes a good question? Towards an epistemic classification (Jonathan Osborne and Emily Reigh); and (15) The questioning child: a path forward (Samuel Ronfard, Lucas Payne Butler, and Kathleen H. Corriveau).
When presented with a claim that contradicts their intuitions, do children seize opportunities to empirically verify such claims or do they simply acquiesce to what they have been told? To answer ...this question, we conducted a replication of Ronfard et al. (conducted in the People’s Republic of China) in two countries with distinct religious and political histories (Study 1: Belarus, N = 74; Study 2: Turkey, N = 79). Preschool children were presented with five different-sized Russian dolls and asked to indicate the heaviest doll. All children selected the biggest doll. Half of the children then heard a (false) claim (i.e., that the smallest doll was the heaviest), contradicting their initial intuition. The remaining children heard a (true) claim (i.e., that the biggest doll was the heaviest), confirming their initial intuition. Belarusian and Turkish preschoolers typically endorsed the experimenter’s claim no matter whether it had contradicted or confirmed their initial intuition. Next, the experimenter left the room, giving children an opportunity to check the experimenter’s claim by picking up the relevant dolls. Belarusian and Turkish preschoolers rarely explored the dolls, regardless of the type of testimony they received and continued to endorse the counterintuitive testimony they received. Furthermore, in Study 2, Turkish preschoolers continued to endorse smallest = heaviest even when doing so could have cost them a large reward. In sum, across two different cultural contexts, preschool children endorsed a counterintuitive claim and did not spontaneously seek evidence to test it. These results confirm and extend those of Ronfard et al.
•Are children’s endorsement of counter-testimony short-lived or long-lasting?•Children typically endorsed testimony mostly consistent with visual evidence.•Their endorsement of such testimony ...persisted over several weeks.•Children less often endorsed testimony mostly inconsistent with visual evidence.•Their endorsement of such counter-perceptual testimony faded over time.
When preschoolers are presented with a label for an entity that conflicts with its appearance, they sometimes rely on the new label rather than on the entity’s appearance to categorize the entity and to infer its properties. We examined whether children’s learning from such claims is short-lived or long-lasting and whether the persistence of their learning depends on the degree of fit between those claims and the available perceptual evidence. Children aged 3–5years (N=71) were asked to categorize hybrids. These hybrids combined 75% of the features from one animal or object with 25% of the features from a different animal or object. After categorizing each hybrid, children heard an informant provide a contrary label. Immediately after they were provided with this new label, children often recategorized the entities accordingly, especially when the label matched the hybrid’s predominant features. Children’s endorsement of the informant’s label proved to be long-lasting when it matched the hybrid’s predominant features, typically persisting even after 5weeks. In contrast, children’s endorsement often faded over time when the informant’s label did not match the hybrid’s predominant features. Overall, children were more skeptical of testimony that was more discrepant with the perceptual evidence available to them, and they were less likely to continue endorsing it after a delay. The findings have implications for our understanding of how children eventually come to represent and believe in counter-perceptual and counterintuitive concepts.
Background
Storybooks are an effective tool for teaching complex scientific mechanisms to young children when presented in child-friendly, joint-attentional contexts like read-aloud sessions. ...However, static storybooks are limited in their ability to convey change across time and, relative to animated storybooks, are harder to disseminate to a wide audience. This study examined second graders’ abilities to learn the deeply counterintuitive concepts of adaptation and speciation from multi-day interventions centered around two storybooks about natural selection that were either read-aloud (static) or watched on a screen (animated). The storybook sequence was progressive and first explained—in counter-essentialist and non-teleological terms—how the relative distribution of a terrestrial mammal’s trait changed over time due to behavioral shifts in their primary food resource (adaptation, book 1). It then explained how–after a sub-population of this species became geographically isolated–they evolved into an entirely different aquatic species over many generations via selection on multiple foraging-relevant traits (speciation, book 2). The animated and static versions of the storybooks used the same text and illustrations, but while the animations lacked joint-attentional context, they more dynamically depicted successive reproductive generations. Storybook and animation presentations were interspersed with five parallel talk-aloud assessment interviews over three days.
Results
Findings revealed substantial learning from the read-aloud static storybook sequence. They also revealed substantial learning from the animation condition with patterns suggesting that the dynamic representations of change over time particularly scaffolded acquisition of the deeply counterintuitive idea that a species can evolve into an entirely different category of species by natural selection.
Conclusions
The results provide much-needed optimism in a context of increasing demands for scalable solutions to promote effective learning: animated storybooks are just as good (and may even be better) than static storybooks.
Human culture is uniquely complex compared to other species. This complexity stems from the accumulation of culture over time through high- and low-fidelity transmission and innovation. One possible ...reason for why humans retain and create culture, is our ability to modulate teaching strategies in order to foster learning and innovation. We argue that teaching is more diverse, flexible, and complex in humans than in other species. This particular characteristic of human teaching rather than teaching itself is one of the reasons for human’s incredible capacity for cumulative culture. That is, humans unlike other species can signal to learners whether the information they are teaching can or cannot be modified. As a result teaching in humans can be used to support high or low fidelity transmission, innovation, and ultimately, cumulative culture.
•Younger children are more likely to say that it is ok to ask questions to someone who is busy than older children and adults.•Mothers’ reports of their children’s question asking behaviors show ...that, with increasing age, children are less likely to ask questions to someone is busy.•However, with increasing age, there are no changes in children’s question-asking to someone who is not busy.•Mothers report being more likely to answer their child’s questions when they are doing nothing and less likely to do so when they are busy.•Additionally, mothers with higher scores on a measure of authoritarianism are less likely to answer their child’s question when they are busy than mothers with lower scores.
How do children decide when it is appropriate to ask a question? In Study 1 (preregistered), 50 4- and 5-year-olds, 50 7- and 8-year-olds, and 100 adults watched vignettes featuring a child who had a question, and participants indicated whether they thought the child should ask the question “right now.” Both adults and children endorsed more question-asking to a well-known informant than to an acquaintance and to someone doing nothing than to someone busy working or busy socializing. However, younger children endorsed asking questions to someone who was busy more often than older children and adults. In addition, Big Five personality traits predicted endorsement of question-asking. In Study 2 (preregistered, N = 500), mothers’ self-reports showed that children’s actual question-asking varied with age, informant activity, and informant familiarity in ways that paralleled the results of Study 1. In Study 3 (N = 100), we examined mothers’ responses to their children’s question-asking and found that mothers’ responses to their children’s question-asking varied based on the mother’s activity. In addition, mothers high in authoritarianism were less likely to answer their children’s questions when they were busy than mothers low in authoritarianism. In sum, across three studies, we found evidence that the age-related decline in children’s question-asking to their parents reflects a change in children’s reasoning about when it is appropriate to ask a question.
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