Asking Children to Make Predictions: An Effective Strategy to Activate Prior Knowledge and Improve Learning?

• In Event: 2-160 - The More You Know: How Prior Knowledge Scaffolds Cognitive Development

Integrative Statement

A major challenge in teaching children is that they rarely make deliberate and strategic use of their prior knowledge. Children, thus, do not draw meaningful connections between their knowledge and the to-be-learned material, which impedes their learning performance (Bjorklund, Muir-Broaddus, & Schneider, 1990). However, elaborative prompts can help children in elementary school-age to make efficient use of their knowledge, which brings their memory performance almost to the level of university students (Brod, Lindenberger, & Shing, 2017). Therefore, educators working with children would profit immensely from easy-to-use methods that reliably prompt children to activate their prior knowledge.

In a recent line of research, we have investigated whether letting children generate predictions qualifies as an efficient strategy for activating their prior knowledge and for supporting their learning. An additional benefit of generating predictions is that incorrectly predicted outcomes induce cognitive conflict, which facilitates belief revision (Brod, Hasselhorn, & Bunge, 2018). We hypothesized that, while predictions will successfully prompt children to activate prior knowledge, the extent to which children can leverage the induced cognitive conflict to revise their misconceptions will be related to their executive functions (EF). 29 children aged 9–11 (mean age: 10.0 years) were tested on the Hearts & Flowers EF task (Wright & Diamond, 2014), as well as on two experimental tasks in which generating a prediction was compared to two control conditions: a so-called postdiction condition in which they had to make post-hoc judgments, and a baseline condition in which they were not given an elaborative prompt. In the first task, children acquired knowledge of European geography, whereas the second task was an episodic memory task in which they memorized soccer results. Pupillometry data assessed during the first task suggested that generating predictions lead children to activate relevant prior knowledge and to experience conflict about events that they had incorrectly predicted (as assessed via the pupillary surprise response). Performance data indicated that generating predictions lead to better learning than a baseline condition in which no knowledge activation was required (F(2,52) = 8.32, p < .001). However, this benefit of prediction was not observed when prediction generation was compared to the postdiction condition that required knowledge activation (see Figure 1a). In particular, incorrectly predicted (expectancy-violating) outcomes were learned poorly (Figure 1b). Thus, although incorrectly predicted outcomes evoked surprise in the children, most of them were unable to leverage their surprise for revising their beliefs. We explored one potential reason for why children struggle with incorporating information that stands in conflict with their prior knowledge: their immature EFs. Regression results revealed that children’s EFs, and in particular their inhibitory functions, were strongly and specifically related to their ability to revise their prior beliefs (t = 3.21, p = .001, for the correlation see Figure 1c). To conclude, asking children to generate predictions is an effective strategy to activate their prior knowledge and, if the prediction is incorrect, to induce cognitive conflict. However, only few children were able to leverage this conflict for successfully revising misconceptions – potentially due to immature EFs.

Author

• Garvin Brod, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF)
  Presenting Author