title: Preschoolers' Understanding of How Others Learn Through Action and Instruction.
abstract: It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers' beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3- to 5-year-olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters' actions in learning than older children were (Experiment 1, N = 53). Overall performance improved when the stories explicitly stated that characters were originally ignorant and clarified the characters' actions, but general developmental trends remained (Experiment 2, N = 48). These data suggest that explicit metacognitive understanding of the relation between actions and learning is developing during the preschool years, which might have implications for how children learn from exploration.
authors.affiliation: Brown University.
authors.forename: David M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Sobel
authors.affiliation: Brown University.
authors.forename: Susan M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Letourneau
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D000067489:Metacognition / Q000502:physiology*