Children’s Evaluations of Automaticity in Teaching (Poster 26)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Friday 8:00 a.m.
  In Poster Session: Feedback, Teacher Support, and Instructional Approaches

Abstract

Recent educational approaches have been moving towards automation in teaching. Yet, we know very little about how children reason about automatic-seeming sources of teaching. In order to design educational experiences that effectively use automated teaching approaches, we must understand how children reason about automatic behavior when learning from others. Across three experiments, we show that repetitiveness of feedback is a cue that young children use to detect automaticity in teachers; that children associate automatic behavior with worse teaching; and that the relationship between perceived automaticity and evaluations of a teacher’s quality changes with development. This work demonstrates children’s sensitivity to automatic behaviors in teaching, and sets the stage for future work on learning, interventions, and applications in the classroom.

Authors

• Ilona Bass, Harvard University

• Cristian Espinoza, Harvard University

• Elizabeth Bonawitz, Harvard University

• Tomer Ullman, Harvard University