Children's developing understanding of what and how they learn.
What do children know about learning? Children between 4 and 10 years of age were asked what they thought the word learning meant and then engaged in a structured interview about what kinds of things they learned and how they learned those things. Most of the 4- and 5-year-olds' responses to these questions indicated a lack of awareness about the nature of learning or how learning occurs. In contrast, the 8- to 10-year-olds showed a strong understanding of learning as a process and could often generate explicit metacognitive responses indicating that they understood under what circumstances learning would occur. The 6- and 7-year-olds were in a transitional stage between these two levels of understanding. We discuss the implications of this development with children's theory-of-mind development more generally.
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA. Electronic address: dave_sobel@brown.edu.
David M
DM
Sobel
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
Susan M
SM
Letourneau
D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D056345:Theory of Mind
Children’s learning; Cognitive development; Knowledge change; Metacognition; Source memory; Theory of mind