The Development of Preschoolers as Teachers

• In Event: Early Learning and Teaching: How Do Preschoolers Decide Who to Learn From and Who to Teach?

Abstract

Peer tutoring is a popular and effective instructional strategy (Slavin, 1996). In order to be successful, tutors must track the learner’s developing understanding to adjust their instruction in a responsive manner (Olson & Bruner, 1996). When children are asked to teach a naïve learner, the responsiveness and quality of their teaching is related to their ability to represent other’s mental states – their Theory of Mind (ToM) (Strauss, Ziv, & Stein, 2002). However, because current research has focused almost exclusively on the way children teach when prompted to teach, we do not know whether students’ spontaneous teaching is sensitive to what the person they are teaching knows. This is an important question because peer tutoring in the classroom frequently calls for spontaneous rather than prompted teaching.
Conditions for teaching are that one must both detect a knowledge gap between the teacher and the learner and intentionally act to reduce it (Ziv & Frye, 2004). More specifically, teaching consists of making decisions about whom to teach and how to teach. It also involves revisiting these decisions based on changes to the knowledge state of the learner (Olson & Bruner, 1996). With regard to whom to teach, the person to-be-taught is one who is naive about the content to-be-taught. A knowledgeable person need not be taught. Regarding how to teach, if there is a knowledge difference between two learners, where one learner has some knowledge and the other has none, the strategies used to teach the two ought to be different with more explicit strategies being used to teach the ignorant learner. Finally, teaching involves contingency. It ought to be adjusted to the changing knowledge state of the learner. In the current study, we tested these abilities, their developmental trajectories, and their relationship to Theory of Mind (ToM) using a new research paradigm.
We found that between three- and six-years-old children increasingly aligned the way they taught to what the learners knew by differentiating whom they taught, how they taught, and by increasingly responding to changes in a learner’s knowledge state. In addition, we found that children’s understanding of false beliefs was not related to children decision about whether to teach. However, we found that if children taught, how they taught, the degree to which children’s teaching took into account the differing knowledge states of the two puppets, was related to their understanding of false beliefs.
This study helps us better understand how children use their knowledge about what others know to decide whether to teach, whom to teach, and how to teach. In addition, these results suggest differing instructional supports to help three to six year old develop their teaching abilities and their capacity for peer tutoring.

Author

• Samuel Ronfard, Harvard University