Poster #25 - Changes in the Cognitive Dynamics of Problem-Solving in Preschool and Early School Aged Children

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

From learning to tie our shoes, to our first experience with algebra, to eventually being capable of organizing full research projects, the development of reasoning and problem solving are critical to general intellectual success. Through meaningful interactions between exploratory learning and more intentional and directed pedagogy, problem solving skills are developing in conjunction with major aspects of cognitive functioning. Important to understanding the transition we as humans make from more dependent learners to independent, self-directing and self-organizing problem solvers is how children might receive different forms of pedagogy, as well as how different manners of pedagogy shape children's ability to discover understandings and acquire certain problem-solving skills. Although both exploratory and direct instruction can be beneficial to learning these skills, it has been found that children's exploratory learning can often be disrupted and/or restricted by pedagogical cues (Bonawitz et al, 2011), suggesting it is still unclear how exactly the activity of learning these skills develops. Research on casual reasoning and executive functioning point to the importance of the real-time, in-task activity of the learners, and how they are directing their cognition towards discovery of understanding and solving a task or problem. However, there are two critical gaps in our understanding: How the cognitive dynamics of learning (coordination of exploratory and directed activities) change over development and how different forms of pedagogy influence and shape those dynamics. While wearing head-mounted eye-trackers, participants (preschool and early school aged children) in this experiment played a problem-solving game in which the objective is to make a series of guesses in order to discover a code (a sequence of colors). The game involved incrementally discovering information towards a correct solution, and systematically receiving feedback as to the correctness of their guesses. Feedback was manipulated to provide more of an opportunity for either more exploratory learning or more directed instruction. This type of game provided a context in which we could observe children's ability to direct their own activities in the presence of varying feedback in order to better inform their own understanding of the game's problem space. As a first step to understanding the cognitive dynamics of problem-solving in this context, attention and allocation of visual attention was analyzed. The eye-tracking data provided information about how children are coordinating their attention to the task and its demands dynamically as the level of information changes in the game. In addition, conventional measures of executive function including the n-back task measure of working memory was employed to help us better determine individual differences in executive functioning, and how these might be predictive of both attention and performance in the task. These findings provide a better understanding of how children are navigating open problem spaces and presenting attention. This information will be valuable to crafting developmentally sensitive programming that is better attuned to the cognitive processes of the learner themselves.

Author

• Shireena McGee, PhD Student
  Presenting Author