Walker Caren M, Lombrozo Tania
University of California, San Diego, Department of Psychology, 9500 Gillman, # 0109, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, United States.
University of California, Berkeley, Department of Psychology, 3210 Tolman Hall, Room 1221, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States.
Cognition. 2017 Oct;167:266-281. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.007. Epub 2016 Dec 20.
Although storybooks are often used as pedagogical tools for conveying moral lessons to children, the ability to spontaneously extract "the moral" of a story develops relatively late. Instead, children tend to represent stories at a concrete level - one that highlights surface features and understates more abstract themes. Here we examine the role of explanation in 5- and 6-year-old children's developing ability to learn the moral of a story. Two experiments demonstrate that, relative to a control condition, prompts to explain aspects of a story facilitate children's ability to override salient surface features, abstract the underlying moral, and generalize that moral to novel contexts. In some cases, generating an explanation is more effective than being explicitly told the moral of the story, as in a more traditional pedagogical exchange. These findings have implications for moral comprehension, the role of explanation in learning, and the development of abstract reasoning in early childhood.
尽管故事书常被用作向儿童传授道德教训的教学工具，但自发提炼故事“寓意”的能力发展得相对较晚。相反，儿童倾向于在具体层面呈现故事——突出表面特征而淡化更抽象的主题。在此，我们研究解释在5至6岁儿童理解故事寓意发展能力中的作用。两项实验表明，相对于控制条件，促使儿童解释故事的各个方面有助于他们超越显著的表面特征，提炼出潜在的寓意，并将该寓意推广到新的情境中。在某些情况下，自己生成解释比像传统教学交流那样直接被告知故事寓意更有效。这些发现对道德理解、解释在学习中的作用以及幼儿期抽象推理的发展具有启示意义。
