Poster #36 - Sensitivity to Scaffolding: do scaffolded children understand when scaffolding is necessary?

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Are learners aware of the extent to which they rely on others to acquire new skills? The source-monitoring literature (Gopnik & Graf, 1988; Robinson & Whitcombe, 2003) has focused on preschoolers’ ability to recall where they learned simple facts and actions. However, learning involves considerably more than committing facts and actions to memory. Learning often requires understanding the ordering of steps in a procedure, desired outcomes, and local mechanistic patterns. Learners could fail to track source for these essential aspects of learning even when they succeed at traditional source-monitoring tasks.
Our studies examine whether children and adults understand the extent to which they rely on others to master a multi-step procedure: using a Crayon Carver™, a toy pantograph. Merely told the machine’s function and asked to learn to use it, no child (n=60) succeeds in learning. The crucial question is whether children who do learn to use the machine with scaffolding from an experimenter recognize the scaffolding was necessary. We predict that scaffolded children will overestimate their ability to learn to use the machine without scaffolding, even when they recognize that they received help.
We asked participants whether they received help in learning to use the machine, and whether they would have learned to use the machine had the experimenter not been there; i.e., without scaffolding. In two pilot studies, both groups recognize that they received help (MYounger=68%, MOlder=70%), but younger children respond at chance levels to the scaffolding question (MYounger=44%) and older children are significantly worse than chance (MOlder=30%), claiming they would have learned to use the machine even without help. In control questions, children also recognize learning the name of the machine with experimenter help (MYounger=92%, MOlder=81%), and that they would not have learned the previous user’s name without help (MYounger=63%, MOlder=92%). We are currently completing the full study and including an adult population for comparison
In follow-up studies, we will address two potential causes of children’s failures. One possibility is that children have difficulty ignoring their current knowledge in assessing past abilities. If so, accuracy should improve when asked about a 3rd party’s ability to learn to use the machine without help. We will duplicate the procedure of first study, but participants will be shown a video of a peer’s learning. Another possibility is that children overvalue teleological information; in the main study, children were asked whether they would have learned to use the machine if told the name of the machine and its function. The second follow-up will ask children whether they would learn to use machine if they were given no information about it.
Children’s overestimation of what they could learn without scaffolding suggests that understanding how knowledge is distributed among minds is more complex than simply “tagging” the source of simple facts. In an increasingly information-saturated environment, “facts” are cheaply acquired; but accurately assessing how much of your understanding is your own versus supplied by others remains a valuable skill.

Authors

• Emory Richardson, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Frank C Keil, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author