How Children Learn

1
How Children Learn

• Chapter 4
• How People Learn, National Research Council,
  Washington, D.C.. 2000

2
Introduction

• Children differ from adult learners in many ways,
  but there are also surprising commonalities
  across learners of all ages.

3
Infants Capabilities

• It was once thought that infants lack the ability
  to form complex ideas.
• Early thoughts that mind is a blank slate.
• Now it is known that very young children are
  competent, active agents of their own conceptual
  development.
• Piaget cognitive development proceeds through
  certain stages, each involving radically
  different cognitive schemes.
• Mind is like a computer.

4
4 Major Areas of Research

• Early predisposition to learn about some things
  but not others.
• Young children show positive biases to learn
  types of information readily and early in life.
• These forms of knowledge, referred to as
  privileged domains, center on broadly defined
  categories, notably physical and biological
  concepts, causality, number, and language.

5
4 Major Areas of Research

• 2. Strategies and Metacognition
• It was previously thought that young children
  lacked strategic competence and knowledge about
  learning to learn intentionally, but in the last
  30 years this has been refuted.

6
4 Major Areas of Research

• 3. Theories of mind
• As hey mature, children develop theories of what
  it means to learn and understand that profoundly
  influence how they situate themselves in settings
  that demand effortful and intentional learning.

7
4 Major Areas of Research

• 4. Children and Community
• All people play major roles as guides in
  fostering the development of learning in
  children.

8
Methodological Advances

• Non-nutritive sucking is a way to use a physical
  capability that even the youngest infants have.
• Habituation involves presenting babies with an
  event to which the baby attends either by looking
  at it, turning to it, or doing something to keep
  it continuing.
• 3. Visual Expectation study infants
  comprehension of events.

9
Early Competencies in the Privileged Domains

• Physical concepts
• At 3-4 months of age infants have the beginnings
  of useful knowledge.
• They understand that objects need support or they
  will fall, stationary objects are displaced when
  they come into contact with other object, and
  that inanimate objects need to be propelled into
  motion.

10
Early Competencies in the Privileged Domains

• 2. Biological Causality
• Infants learn rapidly about the differences
  between inanimate and animate.( This can be
  identified as young as 6 months)
• Young children show an early understanding that
  animate objects have the potential to move
  themselves because they are made of biological
  stuff.

11
Early Competencies in the Privileged Domains

• 3. Early Number Concepts
• Young infants and toddlers also respond correctly
  to the effects of the arithmetic operations of
  adding and subtracting.
• Findings indicate that even young children can
  actively participate in their own learning and
  problem solving about numbers.

12
Early Attention to Language

• Infants have to be able to distinguish linguistic
  information from nonlinguistic stimuli they
  attribute meaning an linguistic function to words
  and not to dog barks or telephone rings.
• By 4 months of age infants can distinguish
  changes in language and start showing preferences
  for different sounds.
• Young children also actively attempt to
  understand the meaning of the language that is
  spoken around them.

13
Early Attention to Language

• Language development studies illustrate that
  childrens biological capacities are set into
  motion by their environments.
• Language has to be practiced as an ongoing and
  active process and not merely passively observed
  by watching television.

14
Strategies for Learning and Metacognition

• The importance of Capacity, Strategies,
  Knowledge, and Metcognition.
• Clustering is a strategy used to improve memory
  performance. Organizing disparate pieces of
  information into meaningful units.
• Chunking organizing into sets of letters,
  numbers, or pictures that make sense to them.
• The importance of prior knowledge in determining
  performance includes knowledge about learning,
  knowledge of their own learning strengths and
  weaknesses

15
Strategies for Learning and Metacognition

• Attempts to aid remembering involve a dawning
  awareness of metacognition-that without some
  effort, forgetting would occur.
• By recognizing this dawning understanding in
  children, one can begin to design learning
  activities in the early school years that build
  on and strengthen their understanding of what it
  means to learn and remember.

16
Strategies for Learning and Metacognition

• 2.Multiple strategies, strategy choices
• Strategies that children use to memorize,
  conceptualize, reason, and solve problems grow
  increasingly effective and flexible and applied
  more broadly with age and experience.
• Strategies differ in their accuracy.
• Discoveries are often made not in response to
  impasses or failures but rather in the context of
  successful performance.
• Short-lived transition strategies often precede
  more enduring approaches.

17
Strategies for Learning and Metacognition

• Generalization of new approaches often occurs
  very slowly, even when children can provide
  compelling rationales for their usefulness.

18
Strategies for Learning and Metacognition

• 3. Multiple Intelligences
• Gardner proposed the existence of 7 relatively
  autonomous intelligences linguistic, logical,
  musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic,
  interpersonal, and intrapersonal
• Dress intelligences directly vs. or focus on
  specific intelligences.

19
Childrens Views of Intelligence and their
Learning Motivation to learn and Understand

• Self-Directed and Other-Directed Learning
• Young children exhibit a strong desire to apply
  themselves in intentional learning situations.
• They also learn in situations where there is not
  external pressure to improve and no feedback or
  reward other than pure satisfaction--sometimes
  called achievement or competence motivation.

20
Guiding Childrens Learning

• Infants activities are complemented by
  adult-child relationships that encourage the
  gradual involvement of children in the skilled
  and valued activities of the society in which
  they live.
• Parents and others arrange their activities and
  facilitate learning by regulating the difficulty
  of tasks and by modeling

21
Guiding Childrens Learning

• Scaffolding involves several activities and tasks
  such as
• Interesting the child in the task
• Reducing the number of steps required to solve a
  problem.
• Maintaining the pursuit of the goal, through
  motivation.
• Marking critical features of discrepancies
• Controlling frustration and risk in problem
  solving
• Demonstrating an idealized version of the act
  performed.

22
Learning to Read and Tell Stories

• Providing children with practice at telling or
  reading stories is an impetus to the growth of
  language skills and is related to early
  independent reading.
• When caregivers engage in picture book reading,
  thy can structure childrens developing narrative
  skills by asking questions to organize childrens
  stories or accounts.
• Story telling is a powerful way to organize lived
  and listened experiences, and it provides an
  entry into the ability construe narrative from
  text

23
Cultural Variations in Communication

• 1.Conversing, Observing, or Eavesdropping
• In some communities, children are seldom direct
  conversational partners with adults, but rather
  engage with adults by participating in adult
  activities.

24
Cultural Variations in Communication

• 2. Schooling and the Role of Questioning
• There are striking differences in how adults and
  children interact verbally.
• People are different in how they treat questions
  and answers.