Abstract
Children’s curiosity often manifests in their exploration—actions that are intended to reveal novel information. In this chapter, we argue that in order to understand how exploration can guide children’s learning, they must first develop an understanding of what learning is and when it occurs in others, as well as a more metacognitive understanding of how their own learning takes place. This knowledge allows children to recognize when they do not know particular pieces of information and strategically generate actions that can close those knowledge gaps. We present evidence that children’s understanding of learning and their ability to reflect on their own learning both develop during the early elementary school years, and synthesize these findings with previous research on exploratory behavior.
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There is a question, however, about what kinds of explanations adults treat as non-circular. For example, adults tend to prefer reductive, but nonsensical explanations over mechanistic ones that stay in the same domain of knowledge (e.g., Fernandez-Duque, Evans, Christian & Hodges, 2015; Rhodes, Rodriguez & Shah, 2014; Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, & Gray, 2008; Weisberg, Taylor & Hopkins, 2015; see Hopkins, Weisberg & Taylor, 2016, for a review).
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A parallel can be drawn to children’s understanding of pretending. At early ages, children engage in pretend play (e.g., Piaget, 1962) and understand others’ pretense (e.g., Harris & Kavanaugh, 1993; Lillard & Witherington, 2004). While the sophistication of children’s pretense does undergo development during the preschool years (e.g., Overton & Jackson, 1973), it is not until well after the preschool years that children begin to appreciate the metacognitive nature of pretending. For instance, understanding that pretenders must know about what they are pretending to be (Lillard, 1993), intend their actions as pretense (Lillard, 1998), or even be aware they are pretending (Sobel, 2004) all develops between the ages of 4–7 (see Lillard, 2001; Sobel, 2009, for reviews). What these data suggest is that children’s engagement in a behavior (i.e., pretending, learning) is not necessarily indicative of their metacognitive understanding of how they are engaging in that behavior, which potentially has a more prolonged developmental trajectory.
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These questions were then repeated several times over a 5-min interview, so that children could generate several different examples. The results presented here represent how children responded over the entire interview, not for any one example.
- 5.
Critically, Legare (2012) reports that there is not a significant interaction between age group and explanation type (p. 181). However, this might have been because the other three explanation types did not show this pattern and age was treated categorically as opposed to continuously.
- 6.
The similarity of our testing session to Cook et al (2011) was validated by Claire Cook, who observed us collect data (Personal Communication, May 29, 2013), and Laura Schulz who viewed videos of the procedure (Personal Communication, August 26, 2013).
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The authors were supported by NSF (1223777 and 1420548 to DMS) when this research was conducted and during the writing of this chapter.
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Sobel, D.M., Letourneau, S.M. (2018). Curiosity, Exploration, and Children’s Understanding of Learning. In: Saylor, M., Ganea, P. (eds) Active Learning from Infancy to Childhood. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77182-3_4
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