Preschoolers' Capacity to Infer Differences in Understanding From Learners' Mistakes Impacts the Way They Teach

• In Event: 14.022 - Sensitivity to Subtleties in Children's Early Learning and Teaching

Abstract

For instruction to be effective, teachers must adjust the way they teach to match what learners know. When prompted to teach a naïve learner, preschoolers effectively select evidence that will help the naïve learner understand a new concept (Gweon, Chu, & Schultz, 2014; Rhodes, Bonawitz, Shafto, & Chen, 2014). However, the capacity to spontaneously differentiate instruction based on learners’ differing knowledge state develops over the preschool years (Ronfard, Strauss, & Corriveau, under review; Wood, Wood, Ainsworth, & O’Malley, 1995).

In order to differentiate their instruction children must be able to infer differences in learners’ understanding based on learner’s actions. Research on children as learners suggests that this capacity develops between three- and four-years-old. Pasquini, Corriveau, Koening, and Harris (2007) found that four-year-old children are more likely to trust an informant who is correct 75% of the time relative to an informant who is correct 0 % of the time while three-year-old children do not show a clear preference for either informant. Children’s developing capacity to represent differences in teachers’ accuracy may affect the way they teach by helping them represent differences in what learners understand.

To test this hypothesis, we taught children a simple game. In this game red but not black pieces had to be placed inside a red square that was drawn on a whiteboard. Once children demonstrated an understanding of the game we introduced them to three puppets: one puppet played the game perfectly, another puppet made one mistake - she put the red piece outside the red square, and a third puppet made two mistakes- she placed the wrong piece outside the red square. We asked children to rate each puppet’s understanding of the game immediately after observing each puppet play. Following their rating of the puppets’ understanding, we asked children to teach each puppet.

We found that children’s ability to make nuanced judgments about what each puppet understood based on each puppet’s unique mistakes improved with age. Younger children (three- and young four-year-olds) did not rate the puppet that made two mistakes as understanding less than the puppet that made one mistake while older children (old four-year-olds and five-year-olds) did. Older children were also more likely than younger children to address the puppets’ mistake in their instruction (i.e. “don’t put it on the outside, you did the red piece which is correct but you need to put it on the inside”). Younger children tended to simply restate the rules of the game by demonstrating or narrating the rule without addressing the puppet’s unique mistake (i.e. “you need to put the red pieces in the square”). Importantly, children who directly addressed the puppets’ unique mistakes more often rated the puppet’s understanding of the game as different than children who did not address the puppet’s mistakes when they taught.

This is the first study to show that children's ability to infer differences in a learner's understanding based on his unique mistakes develops over the preschool period and that this ability is associated with improved teaching (more selective and differentiated).

Authors

• Samuel Ronfard, Harvard University

• Kathleen H. Corriveau, Boston University