Diverse Knowledge, Diverse Cues: Implications for Learners’ Inferences and Actions

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Social learning is often framed as a passive transfer of knowledge from adult to child. However, to learn from others, children must actively reason about a teacher’s epistemic states and how these states inform pedagogical actions. This is no trivial task, since epistemic states are diverse: they differ between potential informants and might involve inaccurate representations and false beliefs, which might need to be inferred without the aid of explicit information. By paying attention to the testimony and actions of others, children can reason about the nature of received information and infer solutions to otherwise difficult problems. This symposium presents three papers cataloguing these abilities, forming a cohesive developmental picture of how children leverage their inferential abilities to maximize benefit in social learning contexts.

Paper 1 demonstrates that 4- and 5-year-olds are able to use information about how others act on the world to inductively infer which information they already knew and which they wanted to learn.

Paper 2 illustrates the converse, providing evidence that 6- to 8-year-olds use information about the correctness of a teacher’s beliefs to contextualize pedagogical actions and optimize their own choices.

Paper 3 integrates these components, demonstrating that 7- to 11-year-olds are able to apply their own actions to evaluate the quality of teaching, and use a variety of self-directed strategies to advance their learning.

Our discussant, an expert in social learning, will use these results to explicate how teaching is a nuanced and reciprocal process between teacher and learner.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Mia Radovanovic, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Henrike Moll, University of Southern California

Individual Presentations

• The Price of Knowledge: Children Infer Epistemic Desires and States from Exploratory Behavior - Presenting Author: Rosie Aboody, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Caiqin Zhou, University of Michigan; Non-Presenting Author: Julian Jara-Ettinger, Yale University

• How Teachers’ Assumptions About Learners’ Abilities Shape Inferences in Pedagogical Reasoning - Presenting Author: Ilona Bass, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Elise M Mahaffey, Arizona State University; Non-Presenting Author: Elizabeth Bonawitz, Rutgers University - Newark

• Is that Right? Active Experience is Applied to Determine Teaching Quality - Presenting Author: Mia Radovanovic, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Ece Yucer, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Denise Arefhaghi, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Christie Lai, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto