How People Learn: Chapter 4

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CHAPTER 4: HOW CHILDREN LEARN

Infants' Capabilities Until recently infants thought to lack ability of forming complex ideas. It is now known that very young children are competent, active agents of their own conceptual development.

Jean Piaget, in 1920s argued that cognitive development of children proceeds through certain stages, each involving radically different cognitive schemes. He also came to a conclusion that the development of an accurate representation of physical reality depends on the gradual coordination of schemes of looking, listening, and touching. After Piaget's work and other researchers' works, the new theories agreed that children are active learners who are able to set goals, plan, and revise. Children are seen as learners who assemble and organize material. The active role of learners was also emphasized by Vygotsky. He came up with the theory of "zone of proximal development".This line of work has drawn attention to the roles of more capable peers, parents, and other partners in challenging and extending children's efforts to understand. It has also contributed to an understanding of the relationship between formal and informal teaching and learning situations.

Major Findings

• Young children show positive biases to learn types of information readily and early in life (Privileged Domains), such as physical and biological concepts.
• Children, like all learners, must depend on will, ingenuity, and effort to enhance their learning.
• As they mature, children develop theories of what it means to learn and understand that profoundly influence how they situate themselves in settings that demand effortful and intentional learning.
• Other people, cultural artifacts, notably television, books, videos, and technological devices of many kinds play major roles as guides in fostering the development of learning in children.

Early Competencies in Privileged Domains

Physical Concepts Research studies have demonstrated that infants as early as 3-4 months of age have the beginnings of useful knowledge. Three examples from many: they understand that objects need support to prevent them from falling; that stationary objects are displaced when they come into contact with moving objects; and that inanimate objects need to be propelled into motion.

Biological Causality Infants learn rapidly about the differences between inanimate and animate: as we have seen, they know that inanimate objects need to be pushed or propelled into motion.Infants learn rapidly about the differences between inanimate and animate: as we have seen, they know that inanimate objects need to be pushed or propelled into motion.

Early Number Concepts The findings indicate that even young children can actively participate in their own learning and problem solving about number.Research also shows that they posses mental ability that facilitates attention to and use of representations of the number of items in a visual array, sequence of drumbeats, jumps of a toy bunny, numerical values represented in arrays, etc.Young infants and toddlers also respond correctly to the effects of the arithmetic operations of adding and subtracting.

Early Attention to Language Infants begin at an early age to develop knowledge of their linguistic environments, using a set of specific mechanisms that guide language development.Young infants learn to pay attention to the features of speech, such as intonation and rhythm, that help them obtain critical information about language and meaning.The biological underpinnings enable children to become fluent in language by about age three, but if they are not in a language-using environment, they will not develop this capacity.

The Importance of Capacity, Strategies, Knowledge, and Metacognition

One view of learning in children is that they have a less memory capacity than adults.A complementary view is that the mental operations of older children are more rapid, enabling them to make use of their limited capacity more effectively.A second view is that children and adults have roughly the same mental capacity, but that with development children acquire knowledge and develop effective activities to use their minds well. Such activities are often called strategies.Perhaps the most pervasive strategy used to improve memory performance is clustering: organizing disparate pieces of information into meaningful units. Clustering is a strategy that depends on organizing knowledge. The importance of prior knowledge in determining performance, crucial to adults as well as children, includes knowledge about learning, knowledge of their own learning strengths and weaknesses, and the demands of the learning task at hand. Between 5 and 10 years of age, children's understanding of the need to use strategic effort in order to learn becomes increasingly sophisticated, and their ability to talk about and reflect on learning continues to grow throughout the school years.

GUIDING CHILDREN'S LEARNING

Parents frame their language and behavior in ways that facilitate learning by young children.Parents and others who care for children arrange their activities and facilitate learning by regulating the difficulty of the tasks and by modeling mature performance during joint participation in activities. Caregivers attempt to build on what children know and extend their competencies by providing supporting structures or scaffolds for the child's performance. Scaffolding involves several activities and tasks, such as:

• interesting the child in the task
• reducing the number of steps required to solve a problem by simplifying the task, so that a child can manage components of the process and recognize when a fit with task requirements is achieved;
• maintaining the pursuit of the goal, through motivation of the child and direction of the activity;
• marking critical features of discrepancies between what a child has produced and the ideal solution;
• controlling frustration and risk in problem solving; and
• demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed.
• Scaffolding can be characterized as acting on a motto of "Where before there was a spectator, let there now be a participant"