Scaffolding the Development of Successful Learning Across Early and Middle Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Learning, the acquisition of new knowledge, skills and behaviors, is a hallmark of child development. In adults, successful learning depends on using effective strategies, goal-directed self-regulation, and efficient decision-making. However, most of these processes undergo prolonged development across childhood. How is it then that children successfully accomplish the numerous learning challenges they face with still developing regulatory mechanisms? The goal of this early-career international symposium is to discuss different approaches to scaffold successful learning in childhood. The symposium aims to integrate research findings from episodic memory and rule learning, and to identify common as well as specific mechanisms by which various strategies, previous experience, and knowledge support children’s learning.

Paper 1 examines how children’s active choice to seek help benefits long-term learning compared to conditions where help is not available. Paper 2 investigates how children use metacognitive knowledge of their cognitive limits to independently devise external cognitive strategies. Paper 3 asks whether children’s learning of hierarchically-structured rules can be improved by scaffolding rule setting processes through strong pre-learned semantic associations between higher-order context cues and lower-order stimuli. Finally, Paper 4 highlights how previous experience with practicing hierarchically-structured rules facilitates the acquisition of new rules and the underlying neural mechanisms supporting this process. Together, by combining multiple scaffolding approaches across different cognitive domains, this symposium helps identify common principles for supporting learning in early and middle childhood, and emphasizes a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to understanding learning development.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chairs

• Diana Selmeczy, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

• Yana Fandakova, University of Trier

Individual Presentations

• The Benefits of Active Help-Seeking During Learning: The Role of Metacognitive Development - Michelle Shields; Presenting Author: Diana Selmeczy, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

• Creativity and Flexibility in Young Children’s use of External Cognitive Strategies - Presenting Author: Kristy Louise Armitage, University of Queensland; Alex Taylor; Thomas Suddendorf, University of Queensland; Jonathan Redshaw, University of Queensland

• Do Strong Item-Context Associations Facilitate Hierarchical Rule use in Children? - Presenting Author: Kerstin Unger, Queens College, CUNY

• Previous Experiences Support Learning of Novel Hierarchical Rules in Childhood - Presenting Author: Sina Schwarze, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Yana Fandakova, University of Trier