3-205 - Children’s Sensitivity to, and Evaluation of, Taught Information

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

How do young children learn from teachers? Prior research has shown that direct instruction supports learning by marking taught information as kind-relevant and generalizable (Csibra & Gergely, 2009) and by constraining children’s exploration to explicitly demonstrated functions (Bonawitz, Shafto, et al., 2011). In the current symposium, we extend prior work by exploring how children’s sensitivity to pedagogical cues is shaped by their experience with direct instruction, their self-acquired knowledge, and teachers’ characteristics.
Paper 1 investigates children’s interpretation of questions as pedagogical cues. Questions facilitate learning of target functions and increase exploration - but only when the teacher is knowledgeable (rather than naïve). Paper 2 asks how children weight taught information against self-acquired knowledge. Children privilege taught information only in instances when the information is unexpected or counter-intuitive. When the taught information is as efficient as self-discovered information, children are more likely to generalize the self-acquired knowledge. Paper 3 asks how children interpret potentially conflicting pedagogical cues (saying one thing and doing another) when learning novel self-regulatory strategies, finding that children attend to pedagogical cues and the social group membership of the teacher. Finally, Paper 4 compares Mayan and American children’s response to pedagogical cues, finding that American children are sensitive to these cues earlier than Mayan children. Thus, the child’s teaching context influences the cues they attend to. Together, these four papers provide novel insights about children’s sensitivity to, and evaluation of, taught information.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Samuel Ronfard, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Kathleen H Corriveau, Boston University

Individual Presentations

• Teaching through Questioning: Examining how pedagogical questions elicit learning - Presenting Author: Asheley R Landrum, University of Louisville; Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz, Rutgers University - Campus at Newark; Fatima Omar, University of Louisville; Patrick Shafto, University of Louisville

• Children’s Decision to Transmit Taught Information Depends on the Efficiency or Intuitiveness of that Information - Presenting Author: Alexandra Was, Harvard University; Samuel Ronfard, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Teaching Self-Regulatory Strategies: The Importance of Model Social Group Status - Presenting Author: Grace Min, Boston University; Kathleen H Corriveau, Boston University

• Learning from Instruction and Exploration: A Cross-Cultural Perspective - Presenting Author: Laura Shneidman, University of Chicago; Hyowon Gweon, MIT; Laura E Schulz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Amanda Woodward, University of Chicago