Preschoolers' Understanding of How Others Learn Through Action and Instruction.

• Autores: David M. Sobel, Susan M. Letourneau
• Localización: Child development, ISSN 0009-3920, Vol. 89, Nº. 3, 2018, págs. 961-970
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers' beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3- to 5-year-olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters' actions in learning than older children were (Experiment 1, N = 53). Overall performance improved when the stories explicitly stated that characters were originally ignorant and clarified the characters' actions, but general developmental trends remained (Experiment 2, N = 48). These data suggest that explicit metacognitive understanding of the relation between actions and learning is developing during the preschool years, which might have implications for how children learn from exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]