Children learn more by observing and experimenting: study

Children learn by seeing and trying things out for themselves. They also learn from what others tell them, especially adults and authority figures like their parents and teachers. When children discover something unexpected, they look for more information by asking questions or verifying claims. Previous research shows that children’s ability to investigate surprising claims made by adults varies by age, with children over the age of six more likely to seek additional information than children aged four and five. However, little research has been done on why children seek information after receiving something startling from adults. (Also read: This is how social-emotional learning can help your children to be successful in life )

A new study published by researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard University in Child Development aims to answer that question.

“Research shows that as children get older, they become more skeptical about what adults tell them,” said Samantha Cottrell, senior lab member at the University of Toronto’s Childhood Learning and Development (ChiLD) Lab. “This explains why older children are more likely to try to verify claims and be more specific in their exploration of objects.”

In two pre-registered studies, the researchers wanted to clarify whether and why children investigate surprising claims.

The first study, conducted in person between September 2019 and March 2020, recruited 109 children aged four to six years from the greater Toronto area, Canada. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the laboratory was closed for in-person testing in March 2020, resulting in lower testing numbers than originally planned. Parents of 108 of the 109 children reported their child’s ethnicity: 49% described their child as White, 21% as mixed ethnicity or race, and 19% as Southeast Asian. Almost all parents answered questions about their educational background, with 18% of the children having parents who did not attend college, 34% having one parent who attended college, and 48% having two parents who attended college.

The children were presented with three familiar objects: a rock, a piece of spongy material, and a hacky sack. One experimenter began by asking children, “Do you think this rock is hard or soft?” All the children stated that the stone was hard. The children were then randomly told something that contradicted their worldview (“Actually, this rock is soft, not hard”) or told something that confirmed their intuition (“That’s right, this rock is hard”). After these statements, all the children were asked again, “Do you think this rock is hard or soft?” Almost all the children who heard statements consistent with their beliefs continued to judge as before: that the rock was hard. In contrast, few of the children who were told the stone was soft continued to judge as before. The experimenter then told the children to leave the room to make a phone call and left the children to explore the object on their own.

The children’s behavior was recorded on video. The study found that most children, regardless of age, tested surprising claims. The authors hypothesized that previously reported age differences in children’s investigation of surprising claims might reflect developments in children’s ability to use the investigation to test more complex claims. It could also be that as children get older, the motivation for exploring changes, with younger children doing research because they believe what they were told and wanting to see the surprising event, and older children doing research because they believe in what they were told were skeptical.

The second study, conducted between September and December 2020, recruited 154 4- to 7-year-old children from the same area as the first study. The parents of 132 of the 154 children reported their ethnicity as 50% White, 20% mixed ethnicity or race, and 17% Southeast Asian. Almost all parents answered questions about their educational background, with 20% of the children having parents who did not attend college, 35% having one parent who attended college, and 45% having two parents who attended college.

Via Zoom (due to Covid-19 restrictions), one experimenter shared his screen and presented eight vignettes to each participating child. For each vignette, children were told that the adult made a surprising claim (e.g., “The rock is soft” or “The sponge is harder than the rock”) and asked what another child said in response should make this claim and why should they make it. The results show that older children (6- and 7-year-olds) were more likely than younger children to suggest an exploration strategy tailored to the claim they heard (i.e., touch the rock in the first example, but the rock and others swam in the second Example). The results also indicate that as children grow older, they increasingly justify exploration as a means of verifying the adult’s surprising assertion. These results suggest that as children grow older, even if they are just as likely to engage in exploration of surprising claims, they become more aware of their doubts about what adults tell them and, as a result, their exploration becomes more conscious, purposeful, and efficient .

“There’s still a lot we don’t know,” said Samuel Ronfard, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and laboratory director of the Childhood Learning and Development (ChiLD) Lab. “But what is clear is that children do not believe everything they are told. They think about what they’ve been told, and when they’re skeptical, they look for additional information that might confirm or refute it.”

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This story was published from a wire agency feed with no changes to the text. Only the headline has been changed.