Brown University.
Child Dev. 2018 May;89(3):961-970. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12773. Epub 2017 Mar 10.
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.
人们普遍认为，探索是幼儿学习的一种机制。本研究考察了学龄前儿童对学习发生方式的信念。我们要求 3 至 5 岁的儿童阐明一系列故事中的角色是如何了解新玩具的。与年龄较大的儿童相比，年幼的学龄前儿童更有可能过分强调角色在学习中的作用（实验 1，N=53）。当故事明确说明角色最初是无知的并澄清了角色的行为时，整体表现有所提高，但总体发展趋势仍然存在（实验 2，N=48）。这些数据表明，对行为与学习之间关系的明确元认知理解在学龄前期间正在发展，这可能对儿童如何从探索中学习产生影响。
