How People Learn:
Brain, Mind,
Experience, and School
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Part II: Learners and Learning
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4
How Children Learn
Children differ from
adult learners in many ways, but there are also surprising commonalities
across learners of all ages. In this chapter we provide some insights
into children as learners. A study of young children fulfills two
purposes: it illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the learners
who populate the nation's schools, and it offers a window into the
development of learning that cannot be seen if one considers only
well-established learning patterns and expertise. In studying the
development of children, an observer gets a dynamic picture of learning
unfolding over time. A fresh understanding of infant cognition and of
how young children from 2 to 5 years old build on that early start also
sheds new light on how to ease their transition into formal school
settings.
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INFANTS' CAPABILITIES |
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Theories |
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It was once commonly
thought that infants lack the ability to form complex ideas. For much
of this century, most psychologists accepted the traditional thesis that
a newborn's mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa) on which the
record of experience is gradually impressed. It was further thought
that language is an obvious prerequisite for abstract thought and that,
in its absence, a baby could not have knowledge. Since babies are born
with a limited repertoire of behaviors and spend most of their early
months asleep, they certainly appear passive and unknowing. Until
recently, there was no obvious way for them to demonstrate otherwise.
But challenges to this
view arose. It became clear that with carefully designed methods, one
could find ways to pose rather complex questions about what infants and
young children know and can do. Armed with new methodologies,
psychologists began to accumulate a substantial body of data about the
remarkable abilities that young children possess that stands in stark
contrast to the older emphases on what they lacked. It is now known
that very young children are competent, active agents of their own
conceptual development. In short, the mind of the young child has come
to life (Bruner, 1972, 1981a, b; Carey and Gelman, 1991; Gardner, 1991;
Gelman and Brown, 1986; Wellman and Gelman, 1992).
A major move away from
the tabula rasa view of the infant mind was taken by the Swiss
psychologist Jean Piaget. Beginning in the 1920s, Piaget argued that
the young human mind can best be described in terms of complex cognitive
structures. From close observations of infants and careful questioning
of children, he concluded that cognitive development proceeds through
certain stages, each involving radically different cognitive
schemes. While Piaget observed that infants actually seek
environmental stimulation that promotes their intellectual development,
he thought that their initial representations of objects, space, time,
causality, and self are constructed only gradually during the first 2
years. He concluded that the world of young infants is an egocentric
fusion of the internal and external worlds and that the development of
an accurate representation of physical reality depends on the gradual
coordination of schemes of looking, listening, and touching.
After Piaget, others
studied how newborns begin to integrate sight and sound and explore
their perceptual worlds. For perceptual learning theorists, learning
was considered to proceed rapidly due to the initial availability of
exploration patterns that infants use to obtain information about the
objects and events of their perceptual worlds (Gibson, 1969). As
information processing theories began to emerge, the metaphor of mind as
computer, information processor, and problem solver came into wide usage
(Newell et al., 1958) and was quickly applied to the study of cognitive
development.
Although these theories
differed in important ways, they shared an emphasis on considering
children as active learners who are able to set goals, plan, and revise.
Children are seen as learners who assemble and organize material. As
such, cognitive development involves the acquisition of organized
knowledge structures including, for example, biological concepts, early
number sense, and early understanding of basic physics. In addition,
cognitive development involves the gradual acquisition of strategies for
remembering, understanding, and solving problems.
The active role of
learners was also emphasized by Vygotsky (1978), who pointed to other
supports for learning. Vygotsky was deeply interested in the role of
the social environment, included tools and cultural objects, as well as
people, as agents in developing thinking. Perhaps the most powerful
idea from Vygotsky to influence developmental psychology was that of a
zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), described in Box 4.1. It refers to a bandwidth
of competence (Brown and Reeve, 1987) that learners can navigate with
aid from a supportive context, including the assistance of others. (For
modern treatments of this concept, see Newman et al., 1989; Moll and
Whitmore, 1993; Rogoff and Wertsch, 1984; from a different theoretical
perspective, see Bidell and Fischer, 1997.) This line of work has drawn
attention to the roles of more capable peers, parents, and other
partners in challenging and extending children's efforts to understand.
It has also contributed to an understanding of the relationship between
formal and informal teaching and learning situations (Lave and Wenger,
1991) and cognition distributed across people and tools (Salomon, 1993).
As a result of these
theoretical and methodological developments, great strides have been
made in studying young children's learning capacities. To summarize an
enormous body of research, there have been dramatic increases in
knowledge in four major areas of research, illustrated in this chapter:
1. Early
predisposition to learn about some things but not others No
evidence exists that infants come into the world as "blank slates"
capable only of registering the ambient events that impinge on their
senses in an undisciplined way. Young children show positive biases to
learn types of information readily and early in life. These forms of
knowledge, referred to as privileged domains, center on broadly
defined categories, notably physical and biological concepts, causality,
number, and language (Carey and Gelman, 1991).
2. Strategies and
metacognition Outside of these privileged domains children, like
all learners, must depend on will, ingenuity, and effort to enhance
their learning. It was previously thought that young children lacked
the strategic competence and knowledge about learning (metacognition) to
learn intentionally, but the last 30 years have witnessed a great deal
of research that reveals hitherto unrecognized strategic and
metacognitive competence in the young (Brown and DeLoache, 1978;
DeLoache et al., 1998).
3. Theories of
mind As they mature, children develop theories of what it means to
learn and understand that profoundly influence how they situate
themselves in settings that demand effortful and intentional learning
(Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1989). Children entertain various theories
of mind and intelligence (Dweck and Legget, 1988). Indeed, not all
learners in schools come ready to learn in exactly the same way. Some
theorists argue that there is more than one way to learn, more than one
way to be "intelligent." Understanding that there are multiple
intelligences (Gardner, 1983) may suggest ways of helping children learn
by supporting their strengths and working with their weakenesses.
4. Children and
community Although a great deal of children's learning is
self-motivated and self-directed, other people play major roles as
guides in fostering the development of learning in children. Such
guides include other children as well as adults (caretakers, parents,
teachers, coaches, etc.). But not only people can serve as guides; so,
too, can powerful tools and cultural artifacts, notably television,
books, videos, and technological devices of many kinds (Wright and
Huston, 1995). A great deal of research on such assisted learning has
been influenced by Vygotsky's notion of zones of proximal development
and the increasing popularity of the concept of "communities of
learners," be they face-to-face or through electronic media and
technologies (see Chapters 8 and 9).
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Methodological Advances |
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The large increase in
the number of studies that address early learning came about as a result
of methodological advances in the field of developmental psychology.
Much of what is now known about the human mind comes from the study of
how infants learn. This work demonstrates that the human mind is a
biologically prepared organism (Carey and Gelman, 1991). In order to
study what babies know and can learn about readily, researchers needed
to develop techniques of "asking" infants, who cannot speak, what they
know. Because infants are so limited physically, experimenters
interested in finding out how babies think had to find methods suitable
to an infant's motor capabilities. New ways were developed for
measuring what infants prefer to look at (Fantz, 1961) and detecting
changes in events to which they are sensitive. Three such methods are
non-nutritive sucking, habituation, and visual expectation.
Non-nutritive sucking
is a way to use a physical capability that even the youngest infants
have. In one experiment, the researchers (Kalnins and Bruner, 1973)
showed 5- to 12-week-old infants a silent color film and gave the
infants a pacifier to suck, the nipple of which was connected to a
pressure switch that controlled the projector lens. The infants quickly
learned to suck at a given rate to bring the movie into focus, showing
not only that they were capable of and interested in learning how to
control their own sensory environment, but also that they preferred a
clear image to a blurry one.
The second method
demonstrates an infant's thirst for novelty. The habituation paradigm
involves presenting babies with an event (a stimulus)--a picture, sound,
or series of sounds--to which the baby attends either by looking at it,
turning to it, or doing something to keep the event continuing. Over a
period of time infants stop responding to repeated presentations of the
same event: that is, they habituate. They recover interest if a
recognizably different event is presented. A combination of
non-nutritive sucking and habituation was used in a study (Eimas et al.,
1971) to show that 4-month-old infants will suck vigorously when first
introduced to the phoneme (speech sound) "ba," then gradually lose
interest and stop sucking. But when presented with a different phoneme,
"pa," they resume sucking.
Because infants will
look at things they find interesting, researchers developed the method
of visual expectation to study infants' comprehension of events. It
uses infants' gaze patterns to determine if they are comprehending
patterns of visual events. For example, an experimenter establishes a
pattern of flashing a picture two times on the left side of a screen and
then three times on the right side. Once this alternating pattern has
been established, the experimenter can watch an infant's gaze while the
pictures continue to be flashed. If the baby continues to gaze at the
left side of the screen after one flash, but then shifts its gaze to the
right side after the second picture appears, then it is assumed that a
distinction has been made between one, two, and three events. Using
this procedure, infants as young as 5 months have shown that they can
count up to three (Canfield and Smith, 1996).
Thus, using infants'
capacities for looking, sucking, and interest in novelty, developmental
psychologists devised methods for reliably studying early aspects of
infant cognition. These studies have been refined for studying early
infant memory development by using bodily actions, such as leg kicking
and arm movements, for determining object recognition (Rovee-Collier,
1989).
Studies like these do
more than simply show that infants actively select experiences; they
also demonstrate what infants are capable of perceiving, knowing, and
remembering. Recovery of interest in a novel speech sound could only
occur if infants could recognize the rather subtle difference between
"pa" and "ba." Discovering that very young infants can see, hear,
smell, and be particular about what exactly they wish to explore led to
an emboldened attitude about the kinds of experimental questions that
could be asked. The answers about infant understanding of physical and
biological causality, number, and language have been quite remarkable.
These studies have profoundly altered scientific understanding of how
and when humans begin to grasp the complexities of their worlds. In the
next section, we present a few examples of infants' learning in these
domains.
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EARLY COMPETENCIES IN THE PRIVILEGED DOMAINS |
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Physical Concepts |
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How do infants learn
about the physical world? Research studies have demonstrated that
infants as early as 3-4 months of age have the beginnings of useful
knowledge. Three examples from many: they understand that objects need
support to prevent them from falling; that stationary objects are
displaced when they come into contact with moving objects; and that
inanimate objects need to be propelled into motion.
Consider the notion of
support--that an object cannot be suspended in mid-air. In one study,
infants are seated in front of a table that includes a platform. They
see an experimenter's gloved hand reach out from a side window and put a
box on top of the platform (possible event) and then withdraw her hand.
Alternatively, when the experimenter reaches out from the side window,
she places the box beyond the platform, leaving the impression that the
box is suspended in mid-air when she withdraws her hand (impossible
condition); see Figure 4.1.
Using the visual
habituation methodology, studies have found that infants as young as 3
months old look reliably longer at the impossible events. This reaction
indicates that infants expect that a box can be stable when a
hand releases it onto a platform, but not when there is no supporting
platform (Baillargeon et al., 1992; Needham and Baillargeon, 1993;
Kolstad and Baillargeon, 1994); see Figure 4.2.
In a study of visual
fixation on consistent and inconsistent events with light and heavy
objects, Schilling and Clifton (1998) also showed that 9-month-old
infants look longer at the physically inconsistent events than those
that are consistent with their expectations; see Figure 4.3. Another well-documented example of
infants' early understanding of physical causality is that stationary
objects are displaced when hit by moving objects. Research studies have
demonstrated that infants as young as 2-1/2 months understand this
concept, though it is not until about 6-1/2 months of age that they
relate the size of the moving object and the distance of displacement of
the stationary objects. "When looking at collision events between a
moving and a stationary object, infants first form an initial concept
centered on an impact/no-impact decision. With further experience,
infants begin to identify variables that influence this initial concept"
(Baillargeon, 1995:193).
In the first year of
life, infants can understand that inanimate objects need to be propelled
into action, that the objects cannot move themselves. For example,
Leslie (1994a,b) showed that 4- to 7-month-old infants expect a point of
contact to be involved in physical displacement. In one study, the
infant watches a film in which a hand approaches a stationary doll and
either appears to pick it up (contact condition) and moves away or the
doll moves in tandem but without physical contact (no-contact
condition). Using the habituation methodology, Leslie demonstrated that
infants are highly sensitive to spatiotemporal discontinuities: they
see the hand as an agent to cause movement in an inanimate object, but
the no-contact conditions are seen as anomalous
events--violations of causal principles.
The early
understandings just described are soon reflected in children's
spontaneous actions. In studies of his own young children's exploratory
play, Piaget found that by 12 months of age they clearly understood the
need for a point of contact to bring inanimate objects into range. For
example, Jacqueline (9 months) discovers that she can bring a toy within
reach by pulling a blanket (support) on which it is placed. During the
weeks that follow, she frequently uses this "schema" (Piaget, 1952:285).
Lucienne (12 months), once having witnessed the action of the support,
rapidly generalized the schema to sheets, handkerchiefs, table cloths,
pillows, boxes, books, and so on. Once the baby understood the notion
of the support, this knowledge transferred rapidly to a variety of
potential supports. The same learning is true of stick-like things
(push schema) and string-like objects (pull schema), as "means for
bringing" (Piaget, 1952:295). Each new acquisition brings with it its
own realm of generalization.
A series of laboratory
studies has reaffirmed and extended Piaget's original naturalistic
observations and provided a fairly detailed description of development
of the push/pull schema from 4 to 24 months of age. As noted above,
Leslie showed that 7-month-olds are sensitive to the need for point of
contact in a pushing scenario. Bates et al. (1980) looked at infants'
ability to reach a toy using various tools. And Brown and Slattery
(described in Brown, 1990) looked at children's ability to choose the
correct tool (with adequate length, rigidity, and pushing or pulling
head) from an array of available tools. It was not until 24 months of
age that children immediately selected the adequate tool, but by 14
months children could do so with some practice. Across the age range of
10-24 months, children first used tools effectively that were physically
attached (unbreakable contact) in contrast to tools that could be
unattached at the contact point (breakable contact) or when the point of
contact needed to be imagined (no contact). Children showed distress or
surprise at trick events--when a tool appeared to be attached but wasn't
or vice versa, thus violating their pulling schema (Brown, 1990).
These studies, taken
together, paint an interesting developmental scenario. Although
children in habituation paradigms seem to understand the need for point
of contact early (5-7 months), they cannot at 10 months apply that
knowledge to tool use tasks unless the contact between the tool
and the goal is provided in the physical layout of the task: the tool
touches the object; the solution is physically situated in the
environment itself. Several months later, infants can learn, with a
demonstration, to envision the point of contact that is not specified in
the visual array, but is invited by the pulling features of the tools.
They can see that a hook would work in getting the tool if it is rigid
and long enough. By 24 months, children readily note the pulling
potential of unattached tools and can make a choice between available
tools on the basis of their adequacy. The research shows that young
children have the requisite knowledge in some sense very early on, but
they need help in the form of demonstrations to prompt the application
of what they know.
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Biological Causality |
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During the past 30
years, a great deal has been learned about primitive concepts of
biological causality. We concentrate here on the differences between
animate and inanimate objects.
Infants learn rapidly
about the differences between inanimate and animate: as we have seen,
they know that inanimate objects need to be pushed or propelled into
motion. Infants as young as 6 months can distinguish animate versus
inanimate movements as patterns of lights attached to forces or people
(Bertenthal, 1993). And Spelke (1990) has shown that if two people come
close together and move away in tandem without touching, 7-months-olds
show no surprise; but if two people-sized inanimate objects come
together and move without a point of contact, they are perturbed (as
measured by the habituation paradigm).
Young children show an
early understanding that animate objects have the potential to move
themselves because they are made of "biological stuff"--they obey what
R. Gelman (1990) calls the "innards principle of mechanism." Inanimate
objects, in contrast, obey the external-agent principle: they cannot
move themselves, but must be propelled into action by an external force.
For example, Massey and
Gelman (1988) reported that 3- and 4-year-old children correctly
responded when asked if novel objects like an echidna and a statue can
move themselves up and down a hill. Despite the fact that the echidna
looked less like a familiar animal than did a statue, the children
claimed that only the living object could move itself up and down a
hill. Similarly, young children in this age range can give sensible
answers to questions about the difference between the insides and
outsides of animals, machines, and natural inanimate objects; see Figure 4.4.
These are only a
handful of findings from a large body of research that goes a long way
to challenge the idea that young children are incapable of considering
non-perceptual data in scientific areas. Given that there is a mounting
body of evidence showing that youngsters are busy constructing coherent
accounts of their physical and biological worlds, one needs to ask to
what extent these early competencies serve as a bridge for further
learning when they enter school.
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Early Number Concepts |
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An ever-increasing body
of evidence shows that the human mind is endowed with an implicit mental
ability that facilitates attention to and use of representations of the
number of items in a visual array, sequence of drumbeats, jumps of a toy
bunny, numerical values represented in arrays, etc. For example,
Starkey et al. (1990) showed 6- to 8-month-old infants a series of
photographic slides of either 2- or 3-item displays. Each successive
picture showed different household items, including combs, pipes,
lemons, scissors, and corkscrews that varied in color, shape, size, and
texture and spatial position. Half of the infants saw a series of
two-item displays while the other half were shown a series of three-item
displays. When they became bored, their looking times dropped by 50
percent (they habituated). At this point, they were then shown displays
that alternated between two and three items, and if the displays showed
a different number of items from what they had seen before, the infants
began to show interest by looking again. The only common characteristic
within the two-item and three-item displays was their numerical value,
so one can say the infants habituated to the set of two or three things
and then recovered interest when they were shown a different number of
things. The infants could have focused on perceptual attributes of the
items such as their shapes, motion, textural complexity, and so on, but
they did not. This is an important clue that they are able to process
information that represents number at a rather abstract level.
Other researchers have
shown that infants pay attention to the number of times a toy rabbit
jumps up and down, so long as the number of jumping events they have to
keep track of is kept between two and four jumps (Wynn, 1996). An
especially interesting demonstration of infants' ability to notice
abstract number information in the environment was reported by Canfield
and Smith (1996). They found that 5-month-old infants used visual
expectation (see previous section) to show that infants are able to
distinguish three pictures presented in one location from two pictures
in another.
Young infants and
toddlers also respond correctly to the effects of the arithmetic
operations of adding and subtracting. Through their surprise or search
reactions, young children are able to tell us when an item is added or
subtracted from what they expected (Wynn, 1990, 1992a, b; Starkey,
1992). For example, 5-month-old infants first saw two objects
repeatedly; then a screen covered the objects and they watched as an
experimenter proceeded to add another object or remove one from the
hidden display. The screen was then removed, revealing one more or one
less item than before. In both the less and more conditions, infants
looked longer at the numerically "incorrect" display--that is, the
unexpected value that did not correspond to their initial training; if
they saw one added, they expected three, not one, and vice versa (Wynn,
1992a, b).
Experimental evidence
of this kind implies a psychological process that relates the effect of
adding or removing items to a numerical representation of the
initial display. A similar line of evidence with preschool children
indicates that very young children are actively engaged in using their
implicit knowledge of number to attend to and make sense of novel
examples of numerical data in their environments; see Box 4.2.
There are many other
demonstrations of young children's interpreting sets of objects in terms
of number. Together, the findings indicate that even young children can
actively participate in their own learning and problem solving about
number. This ability is why children often deal with novel conditions
rather well, as when they tell puppets who are "just learning to count"
if they are correct and if they are wrong or even invent counting
solutions (Groen and Resnick, 1977; Siegler and Robinson, 1982; Starkey
and Gelman, 1982; Sophian, 1994).
But just because
children have some knowledge of numbers before they enter school is not
to say that there is little need for careful learning later. Early
understanding of numbers can guide their entry into school-based
learning about number concepts. Successful programs based on
developmental psychology already exist, notably the Right Start Program
(Griffin and Case, 1997). Although making the entry levels easier,
these early number concepts can also be problematic when it comes to the
transitions to higher-level mathematics. Rational numbers (fractions)
do not behave like whole numbers, and attempting to treat them as such
leads to serious problems. It is therefore noteworthy that many
children experience just these sorts of problems in mathematics when
they encounter "fractions": They believe the larger number always
represents a bigger quantity or larger unit.
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Early Attention to Language |
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We introduced the idea
that children come equipped with the means necessary for understanding
their worlds when considering physical and biological concepts. It
should not be surprising that infants also possess such mechanisms for
learning language. They begin at an early age to develop knowledge of
their linguistic environments, using a set of specific mechanisms that
guide language development.
Infants have to be able
to distinguish linguistic information from nonlinguistic stimuli: they
attribute meaning and linguistic function to words and not to dog barks
or telephone rings (Mehler and Christophe, 1995). By 4 months of age,
infants clearly show a preference for listening to words over other
sounds (Colombo and Bundy, 1983). And they can distinguish changes in
language. For example, after being habituated to English sentences,
infants detected the shift to a different language, such as Spanish;
they did not register shifts to different English utterances (Bahrick
and Pickens, 1988), which indicates that they noticed the novel Spanish
utterances. Figure 4.5
illustrates that American-born infants, at 2 months of age, start
reacting to English utterances significantly faster than they do to
French utterances. Young infants learn to pay attention to the features
of speech, such as intonation and rhythm, that help them obtain critical
information about language and meaning. As they get older, they
concentrate on utterances that share a structure that corresponds to
their maternal language, and they neglect utterances that do not.
By 6 months of age,
infants distinguish some of the properties that characterize the
language of their immediate environment (Kuhl et al., 1992). Around
8-10 months of age, infants stop treating speech as consisting of mere
sounds and begin to represent only the linguistically relevant
contrasts (Mehler and Christophe, 1995). For example, Kuhl et al.
(1992) have shown that the contrasts "ra" and "la" can be learned by
very young English and Japanese babies alike, but later on only the
contrast relevant to the mother language is retained as the other one
drops out (e.g., "la" drops out for Japanese infants). Such studies
illustrate that the learning environment is critical for determining
what is learned even when the basic learning mechanisms do not
vary.
Young infants are also
predisposed to attend to the language spoken by others around them.
They are attracted to human faces, and look especially often at the lips
of the person speaking. They appear to expect certain types of
coordination between mouth movements and speech. When shown videos of
people talking, infants can detect the differences between lip movements
that are synchronized with the sounds and those that are not.
Young children also
actively attempt to understand the meaning of the language that is
spoken around them. Roger Brown (1958) discussed "The Original Word
Game" that children play with parents. Successful participation
involves the child's making inferences about what someone must mean by
paying attention to the surrounding context. Parents of 1-year-olds
report that their children understand much of what is said to them,
although there is obviously a great deal of information that children
really do not understand (Chapman, 1978). For example, Lewis and
Freedle (1973) analyzed the comprehension abilities of a 13-month-old
child. When handed an apple while she was in her high chair and told
"Eat the apple," the child bit it. When handed an apple while playing
in her playpen and told "Throw the apple," the child threw it. Lewis
and Freedle performed an experiment in order to test whether the child
really understood words such as "eat" and "throw." They handed the
child an apple while she was in her high chair and asked her to "throw
the apple." The child bit it. Later, when the child was in her playpen
she was handed an apple and told "eat the apple." She threw it. The
child's strategy was basically to assume that she should "do what you
usually do in this situation." This sound strategy is frequently
correct.
In everyday settings,
young children have rich opportunities for learning because they can use
context to figure out what someone must mean by various sentence
structures and words. Unless she was being tested by tricky
experimenters, for example, the child discussed above could determine
the general meanings of "apple," "eat," and "throw." Similarly, if a
mother says "Get your shirt" while pointing to the only loose object (a
shirt) on the rug, the child begins to understand the meaning of "get"
and "shirt." Language acquisition cannot take place in the absence of
shared social and situational contexts because the latter provide
information about the meanings of words and sentence structures
(Chapman, 1978). The child uses meaning as a clue to language rather
than language as a clue to meaning (MacNamara, 1972). Parents and other
caregivers take into account both context and children's emerging
abilities as they help them extend their competencies. The extremely
important guiding role that caregivers have in children's cognitive
development is discussed further below.
Language development
studies illustrate that children's biological capacities are set into
motion by their environments. The biological underpinnings enable
children to become fluent in language by about age three, but if they
are not in a language-using environment, they will not develop this
capacity. Experience is important; but the opportunity to use the
skills--practice--is also important. Janellen Huttenlocher, for
example, has shown that language has to be practiced as an ongoing and
active process and not merely passively observed by watching television
(Huttenlocher, cited in Newsweek, 1996).
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STRATEGIES FOR LEARNING AND METACOGNITION |
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So far we have reviewed
research that has tapped into infants' amazing competencies that
biologically predispose them to learn. These predispositions help
prepare human infants for the complex challenges of adaptive learning
that come later in life. In order to thrive, children must still engage
in self-directed and other-directed learning, even in areas of early
competence. In this section we look at how children learn about things
that they would not be predisposed to attend to, such as chess or the
capital cities of countries. We discuss how children come to be able to
learn almost anything through effort and will.
It has generally been
assumed that in the arena of deliberate, intentional, mindful, and
strategic learning, young children are woefully inadequate. But recent
scientific studies have revealed hitherto unsuspected strategic
competence and metacognitive knowledge in young children.
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The Importance of Capacity, Strategies, Knowledge, and
Metacognition |
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A traditional view of
learning and development was that young children know and can do little,
but with age (maturation) and experience (of any kind) they become
increasingly competent. From this view, learning is development and
development is learning. There is no need to postulate special forms of
learning nor for learners to be particularly active (see Bijou and Baer,
1961; Skinner, 1950). Yet even in privileged domains, as described
above, this passive view does not fully apply.
In addition, research
in another major area began to show how learners process information,
remember, and solve problems in nonprivileged domains. Known as
information processing (Simon, 1972; Newell and Simon, 1972), this
branch of psychology was quickly adopted to explain developments in
children's learning. All human learners have limitations to their
short-term memory for remembering and for solving problems. Simon
(1972) and others (e.g., Chi, 1978; Siegler, 1978; Klahr and Wallace,
1973) argued that development means overcoming information-processing
constraints, such as limited short-term memory capacity. The crucial
argument for developmental psychologists is whether young learners are
particularly hampered by memory limitations and whether, compared with
adults, they are less able to overcome general limitations through the
clever use of strategies or by lack of relevant knowledge factors.
One view of learning in
children is that they have a less memory capacity than adults. While
there is no doubt that, in general, children's learning and memory
abilities increase with age, controversy surrounds the mechanisms that
affect these changes. One view is that children's short-term memory
capacity, or the amount of mental space they have (M-space), increases
as children mature (Pascual-Leone, 1988). With more mental space, they
can retain more information and perform more complex mental operations.
A complementary view is that the mental operations of older children are
more rapid, enabling them to make use of their limited capacity more
effectively (Case, 1992). If one holds either of these positions, one
would expect relatively uniform improvement in performance across
domains of learning (Case, 1992; Piaget, 1970).
A second view is that
children and adults have roughly the same mental capacity, but that with
development children acquire knowledge and develop effective activities
to use their minds well. Such activities are often called strategies.
There are a variety of well-known strategies that increase remembering,
such as rehearsal (repeating items over and over), which tends to
improve rote recall (Belmont and Butterfield, 1971); elaboration (Reder
and Anderson, 1980), which improves retention of more meaningful units
such as sentences; and summarization (Brown and Day, 1984), which
increases retention and comprehension. These are just three of many
strategies.
Perhaps the most
pervasive strategy used to improve memory performance is clustering:
organizing disparate pieces of information into meaningful units.
Clustering is a strategy that depends on organizing knowledge. In a
classic paper, Miller (1956) described the persistence of a phenomenon
he called the "magical number 7 ± 2" in human mental processing.
Given a list of numbers to remember, sounds (phonemes) to distinguish
from one another, or a set of unrelated facts to recall, there is a
critical change in performance at around seven items. Up to seven items
(between five and nine, actually, hence Miller's title), people can
readily handle a variety of tasks; with more than seven, they simply
cannot process them handily. People have developed ways around this
memory constraint by organizing information, such as grouping together
or "chunking" disparate elements into sets of letters, numbers, or
pictures that make sense to them.
Known as the chunking
effect, this memory strategy improves the performance of children, as
well as adults. A prototype experiment would involve, for example,
presenting 4- to 10-year-olds with long lists of pictures to remember,
far more than they could if they simply tried to remember them
individually. Such a list might consist of pictures of a cat, rose,
train, hat, airplane, horse, tulip, boat, coat, etc. Given a 20-item
list, older children remember more than younger children, but the factor
responsible for better recall is not age per se, but whether the child
notices that the list consists of four categories (animals,
plants, means of transportation, and articles of clothing). If the
categories are noticed, young children often recall the entire list. In
the absence of category recognition, performance is poorer and shows the
age effect. Younger children employ categorization strategies less often
than older ones. However, the skill is knowledge related, not age
related; the more complex the categories, the older the child is before
noticing the structure. One has to know a structure before one can use
it.
These varying
views of children's learning have different implications for what one
expects from children. If one believes that learning differences are
determined by gradual increases in capacity or speed of processing, one
would expect relatively uniform increases in learning across most
domains. But if one believes that strategies and knowledge are
important, one would expect different levels of learning, depending on
the children's conceptual knowledge and their control over strategies
that organize that knowledge for learning. For example, in a comparison
of college students' and third graders' abilities to recall 30 items
that included the names of Saturday morning television shows, children's
cartoon characters, etc., the third graders clustered more and
subsequently recalled more (Linberg, 1980). Similarly, a group of 8- to
12-year-old "slow learners" performed much better than "normal" adults
on a task of recalling large numbers of pop stars because of a
clustering strategy (Brown and Lawton, 1977). An outstanding example of
the intertwining of capacity, knowledge, and strategies in children's
chess performance is provided in Box
2.1 (see Chapter 2).
Metacognition is
another important aspect of children's learning (see Brown, 1978;
Flavell and Wellman, 1977). The importance of prior knowledge in
determining performance, crucial to adults as well as children, includes
knowledge about learning, knowledge of their own learning strengths and
weaknesses, and the demands of the learning task at hand. Metacognition
also includes self-regulation--the ability to orchestrate one's
learning: to plan, monitor success, and correct errors when
appropriate--all necessary for effective intentional learning (Bereiter
and Scardamalia, 1989).
Metacognition also
refers to the ability to reflect on one's own performance. Whereas
self-regulation may appear quite early, reflection appears to be late
developing. If children lack insight to their own learning abilities,
they can hardly be expected to plan or self-regulate efficiently. But
metacognition does not emerge full-blown in late childhood in some "now
you have it, now you don't" manner. The evidence suggests that, like
other forms of learning, metacognition develops gradually and is as
dependent on knowledge as experience. It is difficult to engage in
self-regulation and reflection in areas that one does not understand.
However, on topics that children know, primitive forms of
self-regulation and reflection appear early (Brown and DeLoache, 1978).
Attempts at deliberate
remembering in preschool children provide glimpses of the early
emergence of the ability to plan, orchestrate, and apply strategies. In
a famous example, 3- and 4-year-old children were asked to watch while a
small toy dog was hidden under one of three cups. The children were
instructed to remember where the dog was. The children were anything
but passive as they waited alone during a delay interval (Wellman et
al., 1975). Some children displayed various behaviors that resemble
well-known mnemonic strategies, including clear attempts at retrieval
practice, such as looking at the target cup and nodding yes, looking at
the non-target cups and nodding no, and retrieval cueing, such as
marking the correct cup by resting a hand on it or moving it to a
salient position. Both of these strategies are precursors to more
mature rehearsal activities. These efforts were rewarded: children who
prepared actively for retrieval in these ways more often remembered the
location of the hidden dog. Box
4.3 shows a glimmer of even earlier emergence of "rehearsal."
These attempts to aid
remembering involve a dawning awareness of metacognition--that without
some effort, forgetting would occur. And the strategies involved
resemble the more mature forms of strategic intervention, such as
rehearsal, used by older school-aged children. Between 5 and 10 years
of age, children's understanding of the need to use strategic effort in
order to learn becomes increasingly sophisticated, and their ability to
talk about and reflect on learning continues to grow throughout the
school years (Brown et al., 1983). By recognizing this dawning
understanding in children, one can begin to design learning activities
in the early school years that build on and strengthen their
understanding of what it means to learn and remember.
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Multiple Strategies, Strategy Choices |
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The strategies that
children use to memorize, conceptualize, reason, and solve problems grow
increasingly effective and flexible, and are applied more broadly, with
age and experience. But different strategies are not solely related to
age. To demonstrate the variety, we consider the specific case of the
addition of single-digit numbers, which has been the subject of a great
deal of cognitive research.
Given a problem such as
3 + 5, it was initially believed that preschool children add up from 1
(i.e., 1,2,3|4,5,6,7,8), that 6- to 8-year-olds add by counting from the
larger number ("5, then 6, 7, 8,"), and that from 9 years on, children
retrieve answers from memory because they know the answer (Ashcraft,
1985; Resnick and Ford, 1981). More recently, however, a more complex
and interesting picture has emerged (Siegler, 1996). On a
problem-by-problem basis, children of the same age often use a wide
variety of strategies. This finding has emerged in domains as diverse
as arithmetic (Cooney et al., 1988; Geary and Burlingham-Dubree, 1989;
Goldman et al., 1988; Siegler and Robinson, 1982), causal and scientific
reasoning (Lehrer and Schauble, 1996; Kuhn, 1995; Schauble, 1990;
Shultz, 1982), spatial reasoning (Ohlsson, 1991); referential
communications (Kahan and Richards, 1986), recall from memory (Coyle and
Bjorklund, 1997), reading and spelling (Jorm and Share, 1983), and
judgments of plausibility (Kuhara-Kojima and Hatano, 1989). Even the
same child presented the same problem on two successive days often uses
different strategies (Siegler and McGilly, 1989). For example, when
5-year-olds add numbers, they sometimes count from 1, as noted above,
but they also sometimes retrieve answers from memory, and sometimes they
count from the larger number (Siegler, 1988).
The fact that children
use diverse strategies is not a mere idiosyncrasy of human cognition.
Good reasons exist for people to know and use multiple strategies.
Strategies differ in their accuracy, in the amounts of time their
execution requires, in their processing demands, and in the range of
problems to which they apply. Strategy choices involve tradeoffs among
these properties. The broader the range of strategies that children
know and can appreciate where they apply, the more precisely they can
shape their approaches to the demands of particular circumstances.
Even young children can
capitalize on the strengths of different strategies and use each one for
the problems for which its advantages are greatest. For example, for an
easy addition problem such as 4+1, first graders are likely to retrieve
the answer; for problems with large differences between the numbers,
such as 2+9, they are likely to count from the larger number
("9,10,11"); for problems excluding both of these cases, such as 6+7,
they are likely to count from one (Geary, 1994; Siegler, 1988). The
adaptiveness of these strategy choices increases as children gain
experience with the domain, though it is obvious even in early years
(Lemaire and Siegler, 1995).
Once it is recognized
that children know multiple strategies and choose among them, the
question arises: How do they construct such strategies in the first
place? This question is answered through studies in which individual
children who do not yet know a strategy are given prolonged experiences
(weeks or months) in the subject matter; in this way, researchers can
study how children devise their various strategies (Kuhn, 1995; Siegler
and Crowley, 1991; see also DeLoache et al., 1985a). These are referred
to as "microgenetic" studies, meaning small-scale studies of the
development of a concept. In this approach, one can identify when a new
strategy is first used, which in turn allows examination of what the
experience of discovery was like, what led to the discovery, and how the
discovery was generalized beyond its initial use.
Three key findings have
emerged from these studies: (1) discoveries are often made not in
response to impasses or failures but rather in the context of successful
performance; (2) short-lived transition strategies often precede more
enduring approaches; and (3) generalization of new approaches often
occurs very slowly, even when children can provide compelling rationales
for their usefulness (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Kuhn, 1995; Siegler and
Crowley, 1991). Children often generate useful new strategies without
ever having generated conceptually flawed ones. They seem to seek
conceptual understanding of the requisites of appropriate strategies in
a domain. On such tasks as single-digit addition, multidigit
subtraction, and the game of tic-tac-toe, children possess such
understanding, which allows them to recognize the usefulness of new,
more advanced strategies before they generate them spontaneously (Hatano
and Inagaki, 1996; Siegler and Crowley, 1994).
The new understanding
of children's strategic development has led to instructional
initiatives. A common feature of such innovations as reciprocal
teaching (Palincsar and Brown, 1984), communities of learners (Brown and
Campione, 1994, 1996; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt,
1994), the ideal student (Pressley et al., 1992), and Project Rightstart
(Griffin et al., 1992) is that they recognize the importance of
students' knowing and using diverse strategies. These programs differ,
but all are aimed at helping students to understand how strategies can
help them solve problems, to recognize when each strategy is likely to
be most useful, and to transfer strategies to novel situations. The
considerable success that these instructional programs have enjoyed,
with young as well as older children and with low-income as well as
middle-income children, attests to the fact that the development of a
repertoire of flexible strategies has practical significance for
learning.
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Multiple Intelligences |
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Just as the concept of
multiple strategies has improved understanding of children's learning
and influenced approaches to education, so, too, has the growing
interest in multiple forms of intelligence. In his theory of multiple
intelligences, Gardner (1983, 1991) proposed the existence of seven
relatively autonomous intelligences: linguistic, logical, musical,
spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.
Recently, Gardner (1997) proposed an eighth intelligence,
"naturalistic." The first two intelligences are those typically tapped
on tests and most valued in schools.
The theory of multiple
intelligences was developed as a psychological theory, but it sparked a
great deal of interest among educators, in this country and abroad, in
its implications for teaching and learning. The experimental
educational programs based on the theory have focused generally in two
ways. Some educators believe that all children should have each
intelligence nurtured; on this basis, they have devised curricula that
address each intelligence directly. Others educators have focused on
the development of specific intelligences, like the personal ones,
because they believe these intelligences receive short shrift in
American education. There are strengths and weaknesses to each
approach.
The application of
multiple intelligences to education is a grass roots movement among
teachers that is only just beginning. An interesting development is the
attempt to modify traditional curricula: whether one is teaching
history, science, or the arts, the theory of multiple intelligences
offers a teacher a number of different approaches to the topic, several
modes of representing key concepts, and a variety of ways in which
students can demonstrate their understandings (Gardner, 1997).
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CHILDREN'S VIEWS OF INTELLIGENCE AND THEIR LEARNING: MOTIVATION TO
LEARN AND UNDERSTAND |
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Children, like their
elders, have their own conceptions about their minds and those of others
and how humans learn and are "intelligent" (see Wellman, 1990; Wellman
and Hickey, 1994; Gelman, 1988; Gopnik, 1990). Children are said to
have one of two main classes of beliefs: entity theories and
incremental theories (Dweck, 1989; Dweck and Elliot, 1983; Dweck and
Leggett, 1988). Children with entity theories believe that intelligence
is a fixed property of individuals; children with incremental theories
believe that intelligence is malleable (see also Resnick and
Nelson-LeGall, 1998). Children who are entity theorists tend to hold
performance goals in learning situations: they strive to perform well
or appear to perform well, attain positive judgments of their
competence, and avoid assessments. They avoid challenges that will
reflect them in poor light. They show little persistence in the face of
failure. Their aim is to perform well. In contrast, children who are
incremental theorists have learning goals: they believe that
intelligence can be improved by effort and will. They regard their own
increasing competence as their goal. They seek challenges and show high
persistence. It is clear that children's theories about learning affect
how they learn and how they think about learning. Although most
children probably fall on the continuum between the two theories and may
simultaneously be incremental theorists in mathematics and entity
theorists in art, the motivational factors affect their persistence,
learning goals, sense of failure, and striving for success. Teachers
can guide children to a more healthy conceptualization of their learning
potential if they understand the beliefs that children bring to school.
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Self-Directed and Other-Directed Learning |
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Just as children are
often self-directed learners in privileged domains, such as those of
language and physical causality, young children exhibit a strong desire
to apply themselves in intentional learning situations. They also learn
in situations where there is no external pressure to improve and no
feedback or reward other than pure satisfaction--sometimes called
achievement or competence motivation (White, 1959; Yarrow and Messer,
1983; Dichter-Blancher et al., 1997). Children are both problem solvers
and problem generators; they not only attempt to solve problems
presented to them, but they also seek and create novel challenges. An
adult struggling to solve a crossword puzzle has much in common with a
young child trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle. Why do they bother? It
seems that humans have a need to solve problems; see Box 4.4. One of the challenges of
schools is to build on children's motivation to explore, succeed,
understand (Piaget, 1978) and harness it in the service of learning.
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GUIDING CHILDREN'S LEARNING |
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Along with children's
natural curiosity and their persistence as self-motivated learners, what
they learn during their first 4 or 5 years is not learned in isolation.
Infants' activities are complemented by adult-child relationships that
encourage the gradual involvement of children in the skilled and valued
activities of the society in which they live. Research has shown that
learning is strongly influenced by these social interactions. In fact,
studies of interactions of drug-abusing mothers and their infants show
how the absence of these critical learning interactions depresses 3- and
6-month-old infants' learning (Mayes et al., 1998).
Parents and others who
care for children arrange their activities and facilitate learning by
regulating the difficulty of the tasks and by modeling mature
performance during joint participation in activities. A substantial
body of observational research has provided detailed accounts of the
learning interactions between mothers and their young children. As an
illustration, watch a mother with a 1-year-old sitting on her knees in
front of a collection of toys. A large part of her time is devoted to
such quietly facilitative and scene-setting activities as holding a toy
that seems to require three hands to manipulate, retrieving things that
have been pushed out of range, clearing away those things that are not
at present being used in order to provide the child with a sharper focus
for the main activity, turning toys so that they become more easily
grasped, demonstrating their less obvious properties, and all along
molding her body in such a way as to provide maximal physical support
and access to the play materials (Schaffer, 1977:73).
In addition to the
research showing how adults arrange the environment to promote
children's learning, a great deal of research has also been conducted on
how adults guide children's understanding of how to act in new
situations through their emotional cues regarding the nature of the
situation, nonverbal models of how to behave, verbal and nonverbal
interpretations of events, and verbal labels to classify objects and
events (Rogoff, 1990; Walden and Ogan, 1988). Parents frame their
language and behavior in ways that facilitate learning by young children
(Bruner, 1981a, b, 1983; Edwards, 1987; Hoff-Ginsberg and Shatz, 1982).
For example, in the earliest months, the restrictions of parental baby
talk to a small number of melodic contours may enable infants to
abstract vocal prototypes (Papousek et al., 1985). Parental labeling of
objects and categories may assist children in understanding category
hierarchies and learning appropriate labels (Callanan, 1985; Mervis,
1984). Communication with caregivers to accomplish everyday goals is
the groundwork for children's early learning of the language and other
cognitive tools of their community; see Box 4.5.
An extremely
important role of caregivers involves efforts to help children connect
new situations to more familiar ones. In our discussion of competent
performance and transfer (see Chapter 3), we
noted that knowledge appropriate to a particular situation is not
necessarily accessed despite being relevant. Effective teachers help
people of all ages make connections among different aspects of their
knowledge.
Caregivers attempt to
build on what children know and extend their competencies by providing
supporting structures or scaffolds for the child's performance (Wood et
al., 1976). Scaffolding involves several activities and tasks, such as:
- interesting the child in the task;
- reducing the number of steps required to solve a problem by
simplifying the task, so that a child can manage components of the
process and recognize when a fit with task requirements is achieved;
- maintaining the pursuit of the goal, through motivation of the
child and direction of the activity;
- marking critical features of discrepancies between what a child
has produced and the ideal solution;
- controlling frustration and risk in problem solving; and
- demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed.
Scaffolding can be
characterized as acting on a motto of "Where before there was a
spectator, let there now be a participant" (Bruner, 1983:60).
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Learning to Read and Tell Stories |
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The importance of adult
support of children's learning can be demonstrated by considering the
question: How is it that children, born with no language, can develop
most of the rudiments of story telling in the first three years of life?
(Engle, 1995). A variety of literacy experiences prepare children for
this prowess. Providing children with practice at telling or "reading"
stories is an impetus to the growth of language skills and is related to
early independent reading; see Box
4.6. For many years some parents and scholars have known about the
importance of early reading, through picture book "reading" that is
connected to personal experiences. Recently, the efficacy of this
process has been scientifically validated--it has been shown to work
(see National Research Council, 1998).
In the late nineteenth
century, C. L. Dodgson--Lewis Carroll--prepared a nursery version of his
famous Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass books. The
majority of the book consisted of reprints of the famous Tenniel woodcut
illustrations. The book was to stimulate "reading" in the sense that
contemporary children's wordless picture books do. This was a first of
its kind, and we quote Lewis Carroll (cited in Cohen, 1995:440).
I have reason to believe that "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland" has been read by some hundreds of English Children, aged
from Five to Fifteen: also by Children aged from Fifteen to
Twenty-five: yet again by Children aged from Twenty-five to Thirty-five
. . . And my ambition now (is it a vain one?) is that it will be read
by Children aged from Nought to Five. To be read? Nay, not so! Say
rather to be thumbed, to be cooed over, to be dogs'-eared, to be
rumpled, to be kissed, by the illiterate, ungrammatical.
A preeminent educator,
Dodgson had a pedagogical creed about how "Nursery Alice" should be
approached. The subtext of the book is aimed at adults, almost in the
fashion of a contemporary teacher's guide; they were asked to bring the
book to life. The pictures were the primary focus; much of the original
tale is left unspecified. For example, when looking at the famous
Tenniel picture of Alice swimming with mouse in a pool of her own tears,
Carroll tells the adult to read to the child as follows (cited in Cohen,
1995:441):
Now look at the picture, and you'll soon guess
what happened next. It looks just like the sea, doesn't it? But it
really is the Pool of Tears--all made of Alice's tears, you know!
And Alice has tumbled into the Pool: and the
Mouse has tumbled in: and there they are swimming about together.
Doesn't Alice look pretty, as she swims across the
picture? You can just see her blue stockings, far away under the
water.
But Why is the Mouse swimming away from Alice is
such a hurry? Well, the reason is, that Alice began talking about cats
and dogs: and a Mouse always hates talking about cats and dogs!
Suppose you were swimming about, in a Pool of your
own Tears: and suppose somebody began talking to you about lesson-books
and bottles of medicine, wouldn't you swim as hard as you could
go?
Carroll, a natural
teacher, guides caretakers through the task of concentrating the child's
attention on the picture, prodding the child's curiosity by asking
questions, and engaging the child in a dialogue--even if the child's
contribution is initially limited. Carroll asks the adult to lead the
child through literacy events by developing "habits of close
observation." He cleverly suggests certain truths about human and
animal nature, and he opens up a realm of fun and nonsense that the
child can share with the adult reading the story (Cohen, 1995:442).
When caregivers engage
in picture book "reading," they can structure children's developing
narrative skills by asking questions to organize children's stories or
accounts (Eisenberg, 1985; McNamee, 1980). If the child stops short or
leaves out crucial information, adults may prompt, "What happened next?"
or "Who else was there?" Such questions implicitly provide children
with cues to the desired structure of narratives in their environment.
For example, one mother
began reading with her child, Richard, when he was only 8 months old
(Ninio and Bruner, 1978). The mother initially did all the "reading,"
but at the same time she was engaged in "teaching" Richard the ritual
dialogue for picture book reading. At first she appeared to be content
with any vocalization from the baby, but as soon as he produced actual
words, she increased her demands and asked for a label with the query,
"What's that?" The mother seemed to increase her level of expectation,
first coaxing the child to substitute a vocalization for a nonvocal sign
and later a well-formed word for a babbled vocalization. Initially, the
mother did all the labeling because she assumed that the child could
not; later, the mother labeled only when she believed that the child
would not or could not label for himself. Responsibility for labeling
was thereby transferred from the mother to the child in response to his
increasing store of knowledge, finely monitored by the mother. During
the course of the study the mother constantly updated her inventory of
the words the child had previously understood and repeatedly attempted
to make contact with his growing knowledge base.
Middle-class children
between 1-1/2 and 3 years often provide labels spontaneously. One group
of children did such labeling as "There's a horsie" or asked the mothers
for information "What's this?" (DeLoache, 1984). With the 3-year-olds,
the mothers went far beyond labeling; they talked about the relation
among the objects in the picture, related them to the children's
experiences, and questioned the children about their outside experience.
For example, "That's right, that's a beehive. Do you know what bees
make? They make honey. They get nectar from flowers and use it to make
honey, and then they put the honey in the beehive." The mothers use the
situation and the material to provide the children with a great deal of
background information. They continually elaborate and question
information, which are comprehension-fostering activities that must
later be applied to "real" reading tasks.
In these reading
activities, mothers are attempting to function in what psychologists
call a child's zone of proximal development--to stretch what the child
can do with a little assistance (see Box 4.1 above). As the child advances, so does the
level of collaboration demanded by the mother. The mother
systematically shapes their joint experiences in such a way that the
child will be drawn into taking more and more responsibility for their
joint work. In so doing, she not only provides an excellent learning
environment, she also models appropriate comprehension-fostering
activities; crucial regulatory activities are thereby made overt and
explicit.
Story telling is a
powerful way to organize lived and listened-to experiences, and it
provides an entry into the ability to construe narrative from text. By
the time children are 3 or 4, they are beginning narrators; they can
tell many kinds of stories, including relating autobiographical events,
retelling fiction, and recalling stories they have heard. The everyday
experiences of children foster this story telling. Children like to
talk and learn about familiar activities, scripts or schemes, the "going
to bed" script or the "going to McDonald's" script (Nelson, 1986;
Mandler, 1996). Children like to listen to and retell personal
experiences. These reminiscences are stepping stones to more mature
narratives. As they get older, children increase their levels of
participation by adding elements to the story and taking on greater
pieces of the authorial responsibility. By 3 years of age, children in
families in which joint story telling is common can take over the
leadership role in constructing personal narratives.
Reminiscing also
enables children to relate upsetting experiences; such narratives act as
"cooling vessels" (Bruner, 1972), distancing the experience and
confirming the safe haven of homes and other supportive environments.
This early interest in sharing experience, joint picture book reading,
and narrative, in general, have obvious implications for literary
appreciation in preschool and early grades. Indeed, the KEEP (Au, 1981;
Au and Jordan, 1981) program in Hawaii and the Reciprocal Teaching
Program (Palinscar and Brown, 1984) in urban U.S. cities were both
explicitly modeled after the natural interactions; they attempted to
build on them and model the style. Connection-making and scaffolding by
parents to support children's mathematical learning has also proved a
successful intervention (Saxe et al., 1984; Byrnes, 1996) that has been
mimicked in school settings.
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Cultural Variations in Communication |
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There are great
cultural variations in the ways in which adults and children
communicate, and there are wide individual differences in communication
styles within any cultural community. All cultural variations provide
strong supports for children's development. However, some variations
are more likely than others to encourage development of the specific
kinds of knowledge and interaction styles that are expected in typical
U.S. school environments. It is extremely important for educators--and
parents--to take these differences into account.
Conversing, Observing, or Eavesdropping
In some communities,
children are seldom direct conversational partners with adults, but
rather engage with adults by participating in adult activities. In such
situations, children's learning occurs through observing adults and from
the pointers and support provided by adults in the contexts of ongoing
activities. Such engagements contrast sharply with patterns common in
other communities, in which adults take the role of directly instructing
young children in language and other skills through explicit lessons
that are not embedded in the contexts of ongoing activities (Ochs and
Schieffelin, 1984; Rogoff, 1990; Rogoff et al., 1993).
For example, Pueblo
Indian children are provided access to many aspects of adult life and
are free to choose how and with whom to participate (John-Steiner,
1984). Their reports of their own learning stress their role as
"apprentices" to more experienced members of the community (Suina and
Smolkin, 1994). Observation and verbal explanation occur in the
contexts of involvement in the processes as they are being learned.
In an African-American
community of Louisiana, in which children are expected to be "seen and
not heard," language learning occurs by eavesdropping. "The silent
absorption in community life, the participation in the daily commercial
rituals, and the hours spent overhearing adults' conversations should
not be underestimated in their impact on a child's language growth"
(Ward, 1971:37). "Nothing is censored for children's ears; they go
everywhere in the community except Saturday-night parties." Older
children teach social and intellectual skills: "Alphabets, colors,
numbers, rhymes, word games, pen and pencil games are learned . . . from
older children. No child, even the firstborn, is without such tutelage,
since cousins, aunts, and uncles of their own age and older are always
on hand" (Ward, 1971:25).
In this community,
small children are not conversational partners with adults, as in the
sense of other people with whom one converses. If children have
something important to say, parents will listen, and children had better
listen when their parents speak to them. But for conversation, adults
talk to adults. Questions between older children and adults involve
straightforward requests for information, not questions asked for the
sake of conversation or for parents to drill children on topics to which
the parents already know the answers. Mothers' speech to children,
while not taking the form of a dialogue, is carefully regularized,
providing precise, workable models of the language used in the community
(Ward, 1971).
Schooling and the Role of Questioning
Detailed ethnographic
research studies have shown striking differences in how adults and
children interact verbally. Because of the prevalence of the use of
questions in classrooms, one particularly important difference is how
people treat questions and answers. One classic study, a comparison
between the questioning behavior of white middle-class teachers in their
own homes and the home question interaction of their working-class
African-American pupils, showed dramatic differences (Heath, 1981,
1983). The middle-class mothers began the questioning game almost from
birth and well before a child could be expected to answer. For example,
a mother questions her 8-week-old infant, "You want your teddy bear?"
and responds for the child, "Yes, you want your bear" (see Box 4.6 above). These rituals set
the stage for a general reliance on questioning and pseudo-questioning
interactions that serve a variety of social functions. Children exposed
to these interaction patterns seem compelled to provide an answer and
are quite happy to provide information that they know perfectly well an
adult already possesses.
Such "known-answer"
questions, where the interrogator has the information being requested,
occur frequently in classroom dialogues (Mehan, 1979). Teachers
routinely call on children to answer questions that serve to display and
practice their knowledge, rather than to provide information that the
teacher does not know. Similarly, in middle-class homes, known-answer
questions predominate. For example, in one 48-hour period, almost half
the utterances (48% of 215) addressed to 27-month-old Missy were
questions; of these questions, almost half (46%) were known-answer
questions (Heath, 1981, 1983).
In general, questions
played a less central role in the home social interaction patterns of
the African-American children; in particular, there was a notable lack
of known-answer rituals (Heath, 1981, 1983). The verbal interactions
served a different function, and they were embedded within different
communicative and interpersonal contexts. Common questioning forms were
analogy, story-starting, and accusatory; these forms rarely occurred in
the white homes. For example, the African-American children were
commonly asked to engage in the sophisticated use of metaphors by
responding to questions that asked for analogical comparisons. The
children were more likely to be asked "What's that like?" or "Who's he
acting like?" rather than "What's that?" Such questions reflected the
African-American adults' assumptions that preschool children are adept
at noting likenesses between things, assumptions that are also revealed
in speech forms other than questioning, such as frequent use of similes
and metaphors. The adults were asked about and value metaphorical
thinking and narrative exposition initiated by a story-telling question:
one participant indicated a willingness to tell a story using the
question form, "Did you see Maggie's dog yesterday?" The appropriate
answer to such a query is not "yes" or "no," but another question, "No,
what happened to Maggie's dog yesterday?" that sets the stage for the
initiator's narrative. Both adults and older preschool children were
totally familiar with these questioning rituals and played them
enthusiastically.
These examples
emphasize the systematic differences between the form and function of
questioning behaviors in the working-class black and middle-class white
communities that were studied. Neither approach is "deficient," but the
match between the activities that predominate in classrooms at the early
grades is much greater with middle-class homes than with working-class
ones in that community. As the middle-class teachers practiced their
familiar questioning routines with their pupils, it is not surprising
that the middle-class pupils, who shared the teacher's background,
successfully fulfilled the answerer role, while the working-class
African-American children were often perplexed (Heath, 1981, 1983).
Moreover, teachers were sometimes bewildered by what they regarded as
the lack of responsible answering behavior on the part of their black
pupils. They commented (Heath, 1981:108):
They don't seem to be able to answer even the
simplest questions.
I would almost think some of them have a hearing
problem; it is as though they don't hear me ask a question. I get blank
stares to my question. When I am making statements or telling stories
which interest them, they always seem to hear me.
The simplest questions are the ones they can't
answer in the classroom; yet on the playground, they can explain a rule
for a ballgame, etc. They can't be as dumb as they seem in my
class.
I sometimes feel that when I look at them and ask
a question I'm staring at a wall I can't break through.
However, as the
teachers learned about the types of metaphoric and narrative question
sequences with which the children are familiar, they were able to
gradually introduce the unfamiliar known-answer routines. This is an
excellent example of the "two-way path, from school to the community and
from the community to school" (Heath, 1981:125) that is needed if the
transition to formal schooling is to be made less traumatic for
ethnically diverse groups. Not only can interventions be devised to
help minority-culture parents prepare children for school, but the
schools themselves can be sensitive to the problems of cultural
mismatches. The answer is not to concentrate exclusively on changing
children or changing schools, but to encourage adaptive flexibility in
both directions.
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CONCLUSION |
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The concept of
"development" is critical to understanding the changes in children's
thinking, such as the development of language, causal reasoning, and
rudimentary mathematical concepts.
Young children are
actively engaged in making sense of their worlds. In some particular
domains, such as biological and physical causality, number, and
language, they have strong predispositions to learn rapidly and readily.
These predispositions support and may even make possible early learning
and pave the way for competence in early schooling. Yet even in these
domains, children still have a great deal of learning to do.
Children's early
understanding of the perceptual and physical world may jump-start the
learning process, even making learning possible, but one should look
with caution for ways in which early knowledge may impede later
learning. For example, children who treat rational numbers as they had
treated whole numbers will experience trouble ahead. Awareness of these
roadblocks to learning could help teachers anticipate the difficulty.
Although children learn
readily in some domains, they can learn practically anything by sheer
will and effort. When required to learn about nonprivileged domains
they need to develop strategies of intentional learning. In order to
develop strategic competence in learning, children need to understand
what it means to learn, who they are as learners, and how to go about
planning, monitoring, revising, and reflecting upon their learning and
that of others. Children lack knowledge and experience but not
reasoning ability. Although young children are inexperienced, they
reason facilely with the knowledge they have.
Children are
both problem solvers and problem generators: children attempt to solve
problems presented to them, and they also seek novel challenges. They
refine and improve their problem-solving strategies not only in the face
of failure, but also by building on prior success. They persist because
success and understanding are motivating in their own right.
Adults help
make connections between new situations and familiar ones for children.
Children's curiosity and persistence are supported by adults who direct
their attention, structure their experiences, support their learning
attempts, and regulate the complexity and difficulty levels of
information for them.
Children, thus, exhibit
capacities that are shaped by environmental experiences and the
individuals who care for them. Caregivers provide supports, such as
directing children's attention to critical aspects of events, commenting
on features that should be noticed, and in many other ways providing
structure to the information. Structure is critical for learning and
for moving toward understanding information. Development and learning
are not two parallel processes. Early biological underpinnings enable
certain types of interactions, and through various environmental
supports from caregivers and other cultural and social supports, a
child's experiences for learning are expanded. Learning is promoted and
regulated both by children's biology and ecology, and learning produces
development.
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