How People Learn Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (2000) / Chapter Skim
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4 How Children Learn
4 How Children Learn
Pages 79-113
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From page 79... ...
It became clear that with carefully designed methods, one could find ways to pose rather complex questions about what infants and young children know and can do. Armed with new methodologies, psychologists began to accumulate a substantial body of data about the remarkable abilities that young children possess that stands in stark contrast to the older emphases on what they lacked.
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From page 80... ...
Children are seen as learners who assemble and organize material. As such, cognitive development involves the acquisition of organized knowledge structures including, for example, biological concepts, early number sense, and early understanding of basic physics.
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From page 81... ...
These functions could be called the "buds," rather than the fruits of development. The actual developmental level characterizes mental development retrospectively, while the zone of proximal development characterizes mental development prospectively (Vygotsky, 1978:8687)
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From page 82... ...
A great deal of research on such assisted learning has been influenced by Vygotsky's notion of zones of proximal development and the increasing popularity of the concept of "communities of learners," be they face-to-face or through electronic media and technologies (see Chapters 8 and 91. Methodological Advances The large increase in the number of studies that address early learning came about as a result of methodological advances in the field of developmental psychology.
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From page 83... ...
Thus, using infants' capacities for looking, sucking, and interest in novelty, developmental psychologists devised methods for reliably studying early aspects of infant cognition. These studies have been refined for studying early infant memory development by using bodily actions, such as leg kicking and arm movements, for determining object recognition (Rovee-Collier, 19891.
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From page 84... ...
Research studies have demonstrated that infants as early as 3-4 months of age have the beginnings of useful knowledge. Three examples from many: they understand that objects need support to prevent them from falling; that stationary objects are displaced when they come into contact with moving objects; and that inanimate objects need to be propelled into motion.
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From page 85... ...
With further experience, infants begin to identify variables that influence this initial concept" (Baillargeon, 1995:1931. In the first year of life, infants can understand that inanimate objects need to be propelled into action, that the objects cannot move themselves.
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From page 86... ...
86 HOW PEOPLE LEARN, EXPANDED EDITION 1 Test Events Habituation Events :: ~ i: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ i: I: I: ~ Ail: : i ~ T 27 ~~: is :: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ S~SSS 1 l ~ ~ .:~ :~ j~:~j~ ~ ~ ~ :~: ~ ::: ~ If: ~ hi:: :: . ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~~ : ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ _ Possible Event it?
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From page 87... ...
from an array of available tools. It was not until 24 months of age that children immediately selected the adequate tool, but by 14 months children could do so with some practice.
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From page 88... ...
Infants learn rapidly about the differences between inanimate and animate: as we have seen, they know that inanimate objects need to be pushed or propelled into motion. Infants as young as 6 months can distinguish animate versus inanimate movements as patterns of lights attached to forces or people (Bertenthal, 19931.
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From page 89... ...
Given that there is a mounting body of evidence showing that youngsters are busy constructing coherent accounts of their physical and biological worlds, one needs to ask to what extent these early competencies serve as a bridge for further learning when they enter school. Early Number Concepts An ever-increasing body of evidence shows that the human mind is endowed with an implicit mental ability that facilitates attention to and use of representations of the number of items in a visual array, sequence of drumbeats, jumps of a toy bunny, numerical values represented in arrays, etc.
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From page 90... ...
9o HOW PEOPLE LEARN, EXPANDED EDITION FIGURE 4.4 Drawings used in studying preschoolers' reasoning about movement. SOURCE: Massey and Gelman ( 1988:3091.
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From page 91... ...
A similar line of evidence with preschool children indicates that very young children are actively engaged in using their implicit knowledge of number to attend to and make sense of novel examples of numerical data in their environments; see Box 4.2. There are many other demonstrations of young children's interpreting sets of objects in terms of number.
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From page 92... ...
92 HOW PEOPLE LEARN, EXPANDED EDITION BOX4.2 How Many? | How do 3- to 5-year old children react when they encounter unexpected changes in the number of items?
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From page 93... ...
By 6 months of age, infants distinguish some of the properties that characterize the language of their immediate environment (Kuhl et al., 19921. Around 8-10 months of age, infants stop treating speech as consisting of mere sounds and begin to represent only the linguistically relevant contrasts (Mehler and Christophe, 19951.
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From page 94... ...
. Such studies illustrate that the learning environment is critical for determining what is learned even when the basic learning mechanisms do not vary.
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From page 95... ...
Language development studies illustrate that children's biological capacities are set into motion by their environments. The biological underpinnings enable children to become fluent in language by about age three, but if they are not in a language-using environment, they will not develop this capacity.
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From page 96... ...
A complementary view is that the mental operations of older children are more rapid, enabling them to make use of their limited capacity more effectively (Case, 19921. If one holds either of these positions, one would expect relatively uniform improvement in performance across domains of learning (Case, 1992; Piaget, 19701.
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From page 97... ...
These varying views of children's learning have different implications for what one expects from children. If one believes that learning differences are determined by gradual increases in capacity or speed of processing, one would expect relatively uniform increases in learning across most domains.
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From page 98... ...
Attempts at deliberate remembering in preschool children provide glimpses of the early emergence of the ability to plan, orchestrate, and apply strategies. In a famous example, 3- and 4-year-old children were asked to watch while a small toy dog was hidden under one of three cups.
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From page 99... ...
For example, when 5-year-olds add numbers, they sometimes count from 1, as noted above, but they also sometimes retrieve answers from memory, and sometimes they count from the larger number (Siegler, 19881. The fact that children use diverse strategies is not a mere idiosyncrasy of human cognition.
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From page 100... ...
The adaptiveness of these strategy choices increases as children gain experience with the domain, though it is obvious even in early years (Lemaire and Siegler, 19951. Once it is recognized that children know multiple strategies and choose among them, the question arises: How do they construct such strategies in the first place?
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From page 101... ...
The considerable success that these instructional programs have enjoyed, with young as well as older children and with lowincome as well as middle-income children, attests to the fact that the development of a repertoire of flexible strategies has practical significance for learning. Multiple Intelligences lust as the concept of multiple strategies has improved understanding of children's learning and influenced approaches to education, so, too, has the growing interest in multiple forms of intelligence.
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From page 102... ...
Self-Directed and Other-Directed Learning lust as children are often self-directed learners in privileged domains, such as those of language and physical causality, young children exhibit a strong desire to apply themselves in intentional learning situations. They also learn in situations where there is no external pressure to improve and no feedback or reward other than pure satisfaction" sometimes called achievement or competence motivation (White, 1959; Yarrow and Messer, 1983; Dichter-Blancher et al., 19971.
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From page 103... ...
Parents and others who care for children arrange their activities and facilitate learning by regulating the difficulty of the tasks and by modeling mature performance during joint participation in activities. A substantial body of observational research has provided detailed accounts of the learning interactions between mothers and their young children.
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From page 104... ...
, we noted that knowledge appropriate to a particular situation is not necessarily accessed despite being relevant. Effective teachers help people of all ages make connections among different aspects of their knowledge.
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From page 105... ...
The majority of the book consisted of reprints of the famous Tenniel woodcut illustrations. The book was to stimulate "reading" in the sense that contemporary children's wordless picture books do.
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From page 106... ...
The pictures were the primary focus; much of the original tale is left unspecified. For example, when looking at the famous Tenniel picture of Alice swimming with mouse in a pool of her own tears, Carroll tells the adult to read to the child as follows (cited in Cohen, 1995:441)
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From page 107... ...
When caregivers engage in picture book "reading," they can structure children's developing narrative skills by asking questions to organize children's stories or accounts (Eisenberg, 1985; McNamee, 19801. If the child stops short or leaves out crucial information, adults may prompt, "What happened next?
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From page 108... ...
This early interest in sharing experience, joint picture book reading, and narrative, in general, have obvious implications for literary appreciation in preschool and early grades. Indeed, the KEEP (Au, 1981; Au and Jordan, 1981)
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From page 109... ...
In an African-American community of Louisiana, in which children are expected to be "seen and not heard," language learning occurs by eavesdropping. "The silent absorption in community life, the participation in the daily commercial rituals, and the hours spent overhearing adults' conversations should not be underestimated in their impact on a child's language growth" (Ward, 1971:371.
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From page 110... ...
the Role of Questioning Detailed ethnographic research studies have shown striking differences in how adults and children interact verbally. Because of the prevalence of the use of questions in classrooms, one particularly important difference is how people treat questions and answers.
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From page 111... ...
Both adults and older preschool children were totally familiar with these questioning rituals and played them enthusiastically. These examples emphasize the systematic differences between the form and function of questioning behaviors in the working-class black and middleclass white communities that were studied.
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From page 112... ...
Although children learn readily in some domains, they can learn practically anything by sheer will and effort. When required to learn about nonprivileged domains they need to develop strategies of intentional learning.
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From page 113... ...
HOW CHILDREN LEARN parallel processes. Early biological underpinnings enable certain types of interactions, and through various environmental supports from caregivers and other cultural and social supports, a child's experiences for learning are expanded.
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