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Question-asking in childhood: A review of the literature and a framework for understanding its development
Abstract
Children's ability to query others is remarkable because it attests to their coordination of a range of complex cognitive capacities and because it allows them to initiate and redirect pedagogical exchanges. It is therefore a catalyst for their ability to learn from others. However, despite its importance for cognitive developmental theorizing and its implications for educational practice, relative to other aspects of children's exploratory behavior, research on children's questions has been relatively sparse and siloed across several disciplines. The aim of this review is to provide a framework for organizing past and future research on question-asking and to use this framework to describe what development and variability in children's question asking looks like between infancy and the elementary school years. We propose that question-asking can be divided into four components: (1) initiation, (2) formulation, (3) expression, and (4) response evaluation and follow-up. Drawing on research from the fields of psychology, education, and developmental psycholinguistics we review what is known and not known about these four components between infancy and elementary school as well as describe sources of variability across development.
... When we ask questions, we usually have a general sense of what the form of answer we are expecting is (Van der Meij, 1987). For example, when asking how something works, we expect to get a procedural explanation rather than a label, and we expect to obtain reliable and relevant answers from the person queried (Ronfard et al., 2018). We also determine the answer to be valuable information, as we do not ask questions about everything we do not know about (Flammer, 1981). ...
... We also determine the answer to be valuable information, as we do not ask questions about everything we do not know about (Flammer, 1981). There is also great variability in the quality and quantity of the questions we ask -some people ask poorly worded or imprecise questions, while others ask more precise questions and more often Ronfard et al., 2018). Although asking questions is a natural and fundamental human activity that is prevalent throughout almost all of our conversations, the exact nature of question asking has not been extensively investigated Flammer, 1981;Kearsley, 1976;Ronfard et al., 2018), with much of the past work focusing on largely qualitative research, essentially cataloging different types of questions people ask (Rothe et al., 2018). ...
... There is also great variability in the quality and quantity of the questions we ask -some people ask poorly worded or imprecise questions, while others ask more precise questions and more often Ronfard et al., 2018). Although asking questions is a natural and fundamental human activity that is prevalent throughout almost all of our conversations, the exact nature of question asking has not been extensively investigated Flammer, 1981;Kearsley, 1976;Ronfard et al., 2018), with much of the past work focusing on largely qualitative research, essentially cataloging different types of questions people ask (Rothe et al., 2018). Thus, a contemporary review of the research is needed in order to further elucidate this significant cognitive tool -Question asking. ...
Question-asking, a foundational aspect of human communication, is an integral part of information-seeking behavior. This review delves into the complex landscape of question asking theories, exploring their many intersections with a myriad of fields such as social discourse, early development, problem solving, artificial intelligence (AI), and educational applications. We explore not just why asking questions is important for cognitive development and learning, but also the nature of good questions and potential benefits of learning to ask better, more complex questions. To this aim, we introduce the Question-Asking in Information Seeking (QuInS) framework, a comprehensive framework synthesizing decades of research on question-asking across developmental, social, educational, and technological domains. Through QuInS, we introduce a unified perspective on the iterative, dynamic processes that drive inquiry, emphasizing how curiosity, creativity, and cognitive engagement shape effective question-asking. We examine the origins of question-asking in childhood, theories of inquiry as information-seeking behavior, and the role of complex, open-ended questions in fostering creativity and problem-solving. In addition, we explore how advancements in AI, computational models, and educational strategies help us formulate better questioning approaches. Lastly, we highlight the implications and future research directions which arise from these different theories and explore how these findings can be harnessed to make people more efficient, effective and creative learners and question askers.
... Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children's speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly learn about the world. As such, questions have been a focus of cognitive developmental research for decades [1][2][3][4][5]. Questions support many purposes in childhood, including providing opportunities for conversational clarifications, the acquisition of factual content, and self-reflection, as well as supporting deeper causalexplanatory belief revision (e.g., [6][7][8]). ...
... Less is known about how questions support the learning of deeper content in pedagogical contexts in which young children spend a considerable amount of their waking hours. Compared to home or laboratory settings, preschool classrooms provide children with a richer social context and opportunities to interact with multiple social partners, including their peers and adults [5,[11][12][13]. Despite preschoolers' increasing ability to selectively determine whose information to trust and whom to ask questions [10,14], formulating questions with proper linguistic characteristics and expressing questions by identifying the appropriate targets can be demanding, particularly in complex social contexts such as the classroom [5]. ...
... Compared to home or laboratory settings, preschool classrooms provide children with a richer social context and opportunities to interact with multiple social partners, including their peers and adults [5,[11][12][13]. Despite preschoolers' increasing ability to selectively determine whose information to trust and whom to ask questions [10,14], formulating questions with proper linguistic characteristics and expressing questions by identifying the appropriate targets can be demanding, particularly in complex social contexts such as the classroom [5]. Although emerging research has begun to examine preschoolers' spontaneous question asking in preschool classrooms, these studies often focus on questions directed at teachers [15]. ...
Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly gain information about the world. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit sensitivity to the knowledge state of potential informants in laboratory settings. However, it remains unclear whether and how young children are inclined to direct questions that support learning deeper content to more knowledgeable informants in naturalistic classroom contexts. In this study, we examined children’s question-asking targets (adults, other preschoolers, self-talk) during an open-play period in a US preschool classroom and assessed how the cognitive and linguistic characteristics of questions varied as a function of the intended recipient. Further, we examined how these patterns changed with age. We recorded the spontaneous speech of individual children between the ages of 3 and 6 years (N = 30, totaling 2875 utterances) in 40-min open-period sessions in their preschool day, noting whether the speech was directed toward an adult, another child, or was stated to self. We publish this fully transcribed database with contextual and linguistic details coded as open access to all future researchers. We found that questions accounted for a greater proportion of preschoolers’ adult-directed speech than of their child-directed and self-directed speech, with a particular increase in questions that supported broader learning goals when directed to an adult. Younger children directed a higher proportion of learning questions to adults than themselves, whereas older children asked similar proportions of questions to both, suggesting a difference in younger and older children’s question-asking strategies. Although children used greater lexical diversity in questions than in other utterances, their question formulation in terms of length and diversity remained consistent across age and recipient types, reflecting their general linguistic abilities. Our findings reveal that children discriminately choose “what” and “whom” to ask in daily spontaneous conversations. Even in less-structured school contexts, preschoolers direct questions to the informant most likely to be able to provide an adequate answer.
... Question asking Ronfard et al. (2018) examined research on question-asking in childhood by focusing on the epistemic function of questions -the use of questions to bridge a gap in knowledge or to resolve uncertainty. These types of epistemic questions can be asked about diverse topics. ...
... For example, children (and adults) request information about labels, facts, procedures, and causal mechanisms and they can do so to obtain clari cation, to rule out possible hypotheses, and out of curiosity or "wonderment". Ronfard et al. (2018) highlighted the great variability in the quality and quantity of the questions people ask, which they stated is in uenced by the precision, wording, and quantity of the questions and that developments in cognitive skills and increases in prior knowledge may allow for deeper processing and more precise questions. The authors argue that question-asking is a powerful learning strategy, yet research on questions has been relatively sparse and isolated across several disciplines (e.g., Gottlieb Ortlieb et al. (2012) further argue that the ultimate goal of education should be advancing beyond the use of the closed questioning style as its only means to assess the learners, with Raphael (1994) stating "If you only ever use closed questions, then you are never going to encourage your learners to think" (Raphael, 1994, p. 114). ...
... Despite these limitations, the results suggest several theoretical and practical implications. As Ronfard et al. (2018) state -research with older elementary school students and college aged students has shown that students can quickly be taught how to ask higher level questions (e.g., "what is the difference between … and …?") rather than lower complexity factual questions, and that this leads to improvements in learning and reading comprehension. In addition, calls from researchers suggest moving towards openended creative question asking teaching methods and advancement beyond the primary use of the closed questioning style (Ortlieb et al. 2012;Raphael, 1994) It is therefore possible that educators may greatly bene t from automated methods of testing and assessing open-ended question complexity, thus helping to foster creativity, learning and advanced comprehension in students. ...
Question-asking, an essential yet often understudied activity, holds significant implications for learning, creativity, and cognitive development. In particular, the quality and complexity of the questions asked are crucial factors affecting these fields. Previous research has explored open-ended question complexity through frameworks like the Bloom taxonomy of cognitive objectives, but the measurement of complexity remains challenging. Recent advancements in natural language processing have enabled automated scoring of psychological tasks, notably predicting human ratings of creativity. Although some methods have been applied to measure question complexity, there has been scarce research so far on the automatic assessment of open-ended questions. Here, we address this gap by employing a Large Language Model (LLM) to accurately predict human ratings of open-ended question complexity based on the Bloom taxonomy and comparing these predictions to existing baseline measures such as semantic distance and word count. Specifically, this study capitalized on previously collected human-rated responses from a creative question-asking task to train an LLM for scoring questions based on the Bloom taxonomy of complexity. Our results reveal that our LLM-generated Bloom scores correlated strongly with human ratings of complexity ( r = .73), whilst also greatly exceeding tested baseline measures. Our study emphasizes the significance of LLM in automating the assessment of open-ended question complexity, fostering cost-effective, automatic, and reliable measurements in this domain. Our study further highlights the exciting possibilities for the continued usage of LLM in education and psychology and their potential in helping study how we ask creative questions.
... Near the age of 2, children increasingly start asking for explanations ("why," "when," and "how" questions). This shift in children's information-seeking corresponds with the development of their mastery of the syntax of questions; according to Ronfard et al. (2018), this developmental sequence applies to children learning L2. ...
... Previous studies have tended to differentiate between two major types of information-seeking questions: factbased questions, which ask for an isolated piece of information, and explanatory questions, which ask for an extensive response containing an explanation of the relation between objects or events (Gauvain et al., 2013;Kurkul & Corriveau, 2018;Ronfard et al., 2018). This division builds on the assumption that a knowledge structure requires two types of information: facts about a given concept, category, or domain and explanatory information that organizes these facts within the concept, category, or domain (Chouinard, 2007). ...
... Tizard et al. (1983) reported that children ask significantly fewer questions in preschool than their parents at home. Furthermore, children's question-asking rates are largely influenced by conversational environments in primary school classrooms (Ronfard et al., 2018). In addition, there is variability in how teachers respond to preschoolers' questions. ...
The current study used sequential analysis to examine dual-language learners’ (DLLs) questions and their relations to teacher responses in the context of small-group shared reading in preschool. Participants were 235 DLLs aged 3–5 years and 60 lead teachers from multiethnic preschool classrooms in Norway. Results showed that across four different books, children most often asked information-seeking questions (61–79%). Furthermore, children asked comprehension- and explanation-seeking questions more often than factseeking ones. Sequential analysis showed that the quality of teacher responses was highly dependent on the type of questions DLLs asked: preschool teachers consistently offered more extended and explanatory responses to DLLs’ comprehension- and explanation-seeking questions, compared to other types of questions. Our results suggest that in this way, children actively influence the extended talk they are exposed to during shared reading. Moreover, their questions offer possibilities for further back-and-forth exchanges about topics meaningful to DLLs.
... To understand visitors' question-asking performance (i.e., the question quality and quantity) at museums, it is critical to explore the factors that are associated with question-asking mechanisms (Graesser & Person, 1994;Ronfard et al., 2018). According to Ronfard et al. (2018), question-asking mechanisms can be explained from a process-oriented perspective and can be broken down into four stages: initiation, formulation, expression, and evaluation. ...
... To understand visitors' question-asking performance (i.e., the question quality and quantity) at museums, it is critical to explore the factors that are associated with question-asking mechanisms (Graesser & Person, 1994;Ronfard et al., 2018). According to Ronfard et al. (2018), question-asking mechanisms can be explained from a process-oriented perspective and can be broken down into four stages: initiation, formulation, expression, and evaluation. "Initiation" involves the understanding that there is some information attainable by asking a question; "formulation" involves identifying the information needed and phrasing a question requesting that information; and "expression" is deciding whether to ask the question, considering both whether there is a reliable source of information and if the context is appropriate for asking a question. ...
... In summary, the literature suggests researchers explore three main factors that might be associated with visitors' question-asking performance at museums: instrumental, sociocontextual, and cognitive factors. Adopting the process-oriented perspective, these three factors might influence question-asking performance at the initiation, formulation, expression, and evaluation stage (Ronfard et al., 2018). Considering previous research, we investigated through a quantitative analytical approach and considered multiple factors that might influence visitors' question-asking performance. ...
Question-asking is essential for reasoning, understanding, and investigating scientific problems within and beyond traditional classrooms. Nevertheless, questions generated in formal and informal learning environments can be infrequent and unsophisticated. This study explores museum visitors’ question-asking quality by considering their interactions with two different modes of a question-asking mobile app (Ask or Game Mode) in two different museum environments (linear non-interactive or non-linear interactive exhibits). Results showed that visitors’ question-asking quality was influenced by app modes and by museum environments. Specifically, we found that visitors’ question-asking quality was significantly higher when using the gamified version of the app (Game Mode) compared to a non-gamified version (Ask Mode) in a linear non-interactive exhibit. Findings also revealed that question-asking performance could be significantly influenced by instrumental factors (such as app performance in answering questions) and socio-contextual factors (such as visitor group inquiry frequency). The study provides fundamental and comprehensive insights for designing active learning environments by considering the influential factors of question-asking.
... Learning occurs both through direct experiences of the environment and through learning from others (Was & Warneken, 2017). Many strategies such as observation, listening, discovery and imitation are used to learn (Ronfard et al., 2018). These strategies can make learning more effective. ...
... Children can obtain information from others in the following ways: by commands (for example, tell me about the stars), by verbal expressions (for example, I cannot open the game on the tablet), by their gaze, by their signs, by gestures and facial expressions, and by asking questions. It has been accepted that children's asking questions to people who are more knowledgeable than themselves is an effective strategy for obtaining information (Ronfard et al., 2018). ...
... Studies show that preschooler' ask questions with very different contents. It has been stated that children ask questions about such subjects as death, religion, science-nature, daily life (Sak, 2020;Samuelsson et al., 2000), culture, social order, natural events, objects (Ronfard et al., 2018), birth, shape of the world, goodness, evil, danger, power, generosity and adventure (Bereiter, 2002;cited in: Hedges & Cooper, 2016). Piaget (1967) divided the content of children's questions into five categories: causal explanation, reality and history, human actions and intentions, justification and classification, and evaluation. ...
The present is a qualitative study which aims to examine the difficult questions of preschoolers' children with different socioeconomic conditions to their parents and the answers of the parents. 60 parents with different socioeconomic conditions whose children continue to preschool education in a province located in the central part of Turkey participated in the study. An interview form consisting of structured interview questions was used to in data collection. The data were analyzed with the content analysis technique. The results of the study showed that the children asked their parents difficult questions about daily life, religion, science/nature and sexuality/birth. The frequencies of children's difficult questions by themes showed difference according to socioeconomic conditions. Parents answered to the children's difficult questions with explanations or leaving the questions unanswered. Parents who did not answer the children's difficult questions used the strategies of passing off, saying that they will look into it, saying that they do not know and offering to look into it together. The frequencies of the strategies used by the parents when they did not answer the children's difficult questions differed based on socioeconomic conditions.
... Infants have even been compared to detectives or scientists, apparently "pre-programmed" for asking questions; they form mental models of the world, assessing plausibility on the basis of observations, manipulating probabilities, and spotting ambiguities when faced with multiple interpretations (Gopnik & Schulz 2004). Children are thus precociously motivated at an early age to learn not only about but also why (Ronfard et al. 2018), and so are especially fit to participate in a community of philosophical inquiry. ...
... This state is selective, depending on various triggers (e.g., how closely their current observations fit their prior beliefs, adults' surprise, expected utility of acquiring explanations, etc.), and may drive question-asking (Liquin & Lombrozo 2020). Preschoolers demonstrate a growing appetite for epistemic questions, i.e., the intentional use of questions to seek information that bridges a knowledge gap or resolves uncertainty (Ronfard et al. 2018). It is noteworthy that the nature of epistemic questions evolves with age: from ineffective, vague and irrelevant at age 3, they become more effective at age 5, targeting people who are experts in the field they are interested in (Mills & Landrum 2016;Mills et al. 2011). ...
Between the elitist “philosophy is for grown-ups” and the demagogic “everyone can be a philosopher”, where does Philosophy for Children (P4C) belong in preschools? What is it assumed, expected, or intended to achieve? How is it implemented? This article reviews the literature evaluating the impact of P4C practices on preschool children (aged 3–6). It identifies the main actual or purported obstacles signaled by educators to argue that philosophy cannot be practiced before age 6. It then appraises, from a cognitive developmental psychology perspective, the reality of these supposed obstacles, considering the underlying developmental skills that very young children may lack compared with older ones. Finally, pedagogical adjustments to P4C school practices are suggested, illustrated, and discussed to adapt this program, initially designed and documented for elementary-school children, to the potential of preschoolers.
... In this study, we sought to understand the impact of a potential e cient, scalable teaching method to bolster curiosity and increase learning. We focused on encouraging children to ask questions, inspired by theories of fostering curiosity in schools (Baehr, 2015;Engel, 2011Engel, , 2015Watson, 2018) and the considerable research that demonstrates children's propensity to ask many, meaningful, informationgathering questions in the preschool years (Chouinard, 2007, see also Ronfard et al., 2018). Young children actively seek out explanations to make sense of the world (Liquin & Lombrozo, 2020), become sophisticated at understanding what and who to ask (Aguiar et al., 2012;Jirout & Klahr, 2020;Mills et al., 2011), and reject unsatisfactory responses (Baum et al., 2008;Frazier et al., 2016;Mills et al., 2017). ...
... Furthermore, questions may engage the learner in predicting answers, which can highlight errors to increase surprise and promote encoding (Brod et al., 2018;Brod & Breitwieser, 2019;Colantonio et al., 2023). Questions are also empowering: they give children a tool to actively expand their own knowledge by engaging with others (Ronfard et al., 2018). Thus, discovering how best to foster question-asking behavior has the potential to improve children's learning via broader increases in intrinsic motivation. ...
Children who are more curious learn more in school, but little is known about how to promote curiosity-driven behaviors. In a preregistered experiment, 103 children (54 boys, 49 girls, ages 5-7-years) were randomly assigned to a condition in which they were encouraged to ask questions, or to listen carefully, during eight one-on-one science lessons over two weeks. Children in the question-asking condition valued new science information significantly more than children in the listening condition (Wilcoxon r = .23). Children with less background knowledge benefited more from question-asking. These results suggest that practice with question-asking can boost some aspects of curiosity and learning.
... In many natural settings, however, people choose among multiple observations that are relevant to a single eventual outcome. For example, in question-asking scenarios, participants are faced with a task (e.g., solving a puzzle or making a categorization decision) and can choose between questions (queries) that are relevant to the task [13][14][15][16] . Translated to a lottery task, this implies a distinct choice situation, in which participants receive combined rewards from several lotteries and choose which lottery to inquire about to best predict the total eventual outcome. ...
... Studies of question-asking abilities show that in such situations participants often generate inefficient, suboptimal queries [13][14][15][16] , but the nature of these inefficiencies are not well understood. A specific question arising from the discussion above is whether choices among alternative observations are subject to value confounds. ...
In natural settings, people evaluate complex multi-attribute situations and decide which attribute to request information about. Little is known about how people make this selection and specifically, how they identify individual observations that best predict the value of a multi-attribute situation. Here show that, in a simple task of information demand, participants inefficiently query attributes that have high individual value but are relatively uninformative about a total payoff. This inefficiency is robust in two instrumental conditions in which gathering less informative observations leads to significantly lower rewards. Across individuals, variations in the sensitivity to informativeness is associated with personality metrics, showing negative associations with extraversion and thrill seeking and positive associations with stress tolerance and need for cognition. Thus, people select informative queries using sub-optimal strategies that are associated with personality traits and influence consequential choices.
... Using different teaching methods and modeling, teachers can scaffold and encourage children to use uncertainty as a way to motivate themselves to explore without being afraid of taking risks (Engel, 2011;McTighe & Lyman, 1988). Curiosity can also be supported when children are given the opportunity to think and ask questions in class (Hidi & Renninger;, allowing them to explore and manipulate information they are learning in a way that lets them figure out what they don't know and make connections between things (Ronfard et al., 2018). In our past work, we developed a theoretical framework for how teachers can support students' comfort with uncertainty and approach to exploring uncertainty . ...
... Consistent with this, research suggests curiosity is observed at quite low levels in classroom contexts (Engel, 2011). The observed lack of curiosity is likely at least partially related to school and classroom rules, reward systems, perceptions, social norms, and pedagogy that is inconsistent with promoting curiosity and being curious (Post & Walma van der Molen, 2018;Ronfard et al., 2018;Van der Meij, 1988). Specifically, a focus on attaining certainty -learning predetermined information corresponding to standards and assessed using standardized tests -directly conflicts with developing a positive approach to uncertainty. ...
Uncertainty can play an important role in learning in educational settings. The realization that one does not know something can be perceived as an opportunity for learning, and the desire to seek this information is related to an important intellectual virtue: curiosity. Specifically, curiosity can be defined as desiring and persisting in information seeking and exploration, especially in response to uncertainty or information gaps. Despite the role curiosity plays in learning, uncertainty is often viewed negatively by students in educational contexts, where performance is valued and leads to performance-oriented goals, rather than mastery-oriented goals. In this chapter, we review how uncertainty-driven curiosity can support learning and develop effective learners. We include a discussion of how curiosity can also support the development of more general intellectual character through its relation to creativity, open-minded thinking, and intellectual courage. Finally, we describe how uncertainty in education can be perceived in maladaptive ways that might suppress curiosity, and give specific strategies related to approaches to uncertainty that can be applied to educational contexts to support curiosity.
... By 3 years of age, children start to refer to their own knowledge states and differentiate between seeing and thinking 79 , perhaps building off experiences of curiosity and information-seeking in earlier years. Preschool children can differentiate between individuals who know and do not know a piece of information and can recognize the sources of people's knowledge 80 . Also in the preschool years, children ...
... From earliest childhood, our learning depends a great deal on the knowledge we glean from other people, including parents and schoolteachers. Yet, ironically, school contexts often actively discourage certain efficient and effective learning strategies, such as revealing our confusion and questions to other people (Ronfard et al., 2018). The purpose of this research is to explore a novel way of promoting learning by reducing students' hesitance to disclose what they do not know. ...
The expression of intellectual humility—publicly admitting confusion, ignorance, and mistakes—can benefit individuals, but can it also benefit others? Five studies tested the hypothesis that teachers’ expressions of intellectual humility would boost U.S. students’ motivation and engagement in learning. In two pilot studies (one preregistered, combined N = 231), adults (50% women; 58% White, 25% Black) and adolescents (48% girls; 53% White, 33% Hispanic) anticipated being most comfortable expressing intellectual humility and interested in a hypothetical math class when a teacher’s class description modeled the expression of intellectual humility relative to when the teacher recommended that students show intellectual humility or mentioned nothing about intellectual humility. Two fully powered, preregistered experiments with undergraduates (both 50% women; Study 3: 58% Asian, 17% Hispanic or Latinx, 16% White; Study 4: 53% White, 16% Asian, 16% Hispanic or Latinx; combined N = 767) replicated these effects and identified three mechanisms: an increase in a sense of acceptance by the teacher, an increase in the sense of belonging with peers, and a decrease in the belief that failure hurts learning. Study 5 (preregistered) revealed that high school students (51% girls; 92% White; N = 411) were more interested and engaged in their classes when they perceived their teachers to be more intellectually humble, with the largest benefits for young women. Longitudinally, teachers’ modeling intellectual humility predicted changes in students’ grades via a willingness to express intellectual humility. Teachers’ intellectual humility may benefit students’ interest, engagement, and learning in school.
... Children's question-asking provides insight into children's level of conceptual knowledge at different ages [7]. Toddlers' questions mainly target factual information, while preschoolers start asking for causes [5,8,9]. Parents respond to children's questions and provide explanatory responses [4, 5]. ...
Question-asking is a crucial tool for acquiring information about unseen entities, such as viruses; thus, examining children’s questions within the context of COVID-19 is particularly important for understanding children’s learning about the coronavirus. The study examined 3-12-year-old children’s questions and teachers’ responses about the COVID-19 pandemic in Türkiye, a non-Western developing context, and the United States, a Western cultural context. A total of 119 teachers from Türkiye and 95 teachers from the US participated in the study. Teachers completed an online survey consisting of a demographic form and a questionnaire asking them to report three questions about COVID-19 asked by children in their classrooms and their responses to these questions. We analyzed children’s questions and teachers’ responses for their type and content and examined demographic factors associated with children’s questions and teachers’ responses. Consistent with the literature, children from Türkiye asked fewer explanation-seeking (i.e., why/how) questions than children from the United States. Children asked questions about viruses and precautions. Teachers responded to children’s questions realistically in both countries. The findings have important implications for how children gain knowledge from teachers when discussing health, disease, and virus topics in two countries.
... Relatedly, the current work did not specify between an initiating question versus a follow up question; this would be another aspect to differentiate when analyzing questions using a more functional approach (see Fitneva, 2012 andRonfard et al., 2018 for reviews on the epistemic and social nature of questions and the development of question-asking during early childhood, respectively). This difference may impact the amount of yes-no questions asked by the caregiver if their child does not first reply to a bid with more open types of questions. ...
Children museums provide an engaging learning environment for families with exhibits designed to stimulate caregiver-child interactions. Specific types of questions have been shown to support child language learning by scaffolding more elaborative responses. This study analyzed the use of question form types during caregiver-child interactions in a children’s museum, aiming to discern their correlation with child language proficiency. We examined and transcribed two exhibit explorations by 43 caregiver-child dyads (3- to 6-year-old children). Our analysis encompasses various syntactic question types (e.g., yes-no, wh-) and measures of child language proficiency, including lexical diversity, morphosyntactic complexity, and overall language ability. Findings reveal disparities in question form usage among caregivers and children, with caregivers predominantly employing closed questions and children balancing closed and open-ended types. Children of caregivers who predominantly posed closed questions exhibited shorter utterances and lower overall language scores. Details on other question forms are presented (sub-types of polar, wh-, alternative, and echo). These findings contribute to our understanding of how question form influences language development and caregiver–child interactions.
... Infants use non-verbal cues actively to request information by selecting knowledgeable social partners, as opposed to ignorant ones (Harris & Lane, 2014;Bashydai et al., 2020;Kovacs et al., 2014). Once children can speak, their question-asking behaviours become more sophisticated and precise (Ronfard et al., 2018). For example, 'why' questions are abundantly used by children to seek further information, to understand how objects function and to test the reliability of the information (Frazier, Gelman & Wellman, 2009). ...
Curiosity is a core driver for lifelong learning, problem-solving and decision-making. In a broad sense, curiosity is defined as the intrinsically motivated acquisition of novel information. Despite a decades-long history of curiosity research and the earliest human theories arising from studies of laboratory rodents, curiosity has mainly been considered in two camps: 'linguistic human' and 'other'. This is despite psychology being heritable, and there are many continuities in cognitive capacities across the animal kingdom. Boundary-pushing cross-disciplinary debates on curiosity are lacking, and the relative exclusion of pre-linguistic infants and non-human animals has led to a scientific impasse which more broadly impedes the development of artificially intelligent systems modelled on curiosity in natural agents. In this review, we synthesize literature across multiple disciplines that have studied curiosity in non-verbal systems. By highlighting how similar findings have been produced across the separate disciplines of animal behaviour, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and computational cognition, we discuss how this can be used to advance our understanding of curiosity. We propose, for the first time, how features of curiosity could be quantified and therefore studied more operationally across systems: across different species, developmental stages, and natural or artificial agents.
... Asking questions and explicitly acquiring knowledge are important skills when humans acquire knowledge about the world (Chouinard, 2007;Ronfard et al., 2018). Inspired by this, we explored methods to dynamically increase knowledge in image recognition by asking questions. ...
In real-world object recognition, there are numerous object classes to be recognized. Traditional image recognition methods based on supervised learning can only recognize object classes present in the training data, and have limited applicability in the real world. In contrast, humans can recognize novel objects by questioning and acquiring knowledge about them. Inspired by this, we propose a framework for acquiring external knowledge by generating questions that enable the model to instantly recognize novel objects. Our framework comprises three components: the object classifier (OC), which performs knowledge-based object recognition, the question generator (QG), which generates knowledge-aware questions to acquire novel knowledge, and the policy decision (PD) Model, which determines the “policy” of questions to be asked. The PD model utilizes two strategies, namely “confirmation” and “exploration”—the former confirms candidate knowledge while the latter explores completely new knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed pipeline effectively acquires knowledge about novel objects compared to several baselines, and realizes novel object recognition utilizing the obtained knowledge. We also performed a real-world evaluation in which humans responded to the generated questions, and the model used the acquired knowledge to retrain the OC, which is a fundamental step toward a real-world human-in-the-loop learning-by-asking framework. We plan to release the dataset immediately upon acceptance of our work.
... There is another, related kind of exploration-exploitation dilemma that has received less attention but that contemporary realities bring to the fore with a certain urgency: the case in which external advice is available to guide the search. For example, bank consultants offer advice about investment strategies, teachers offer advice to students [11], and industry expert consultants advise businesses. The advent of the web, however, has made such expert-adviceseeking experiences a part of daily life for billions of users seeking a diverse array of information types to aid decision-making. ...
During ecological decisions, such as when foraging for food or selecting a weekend activity, we often have to balance the costs and benefits of exploiting known options versus exploring novel ones. Here, we ask how individuals address such cost-benefit tradeoffs during tasks in which we can either explore by ourselves or seek external advice from an oracle (e.g., a domain expert or recommendation system). To answer this question, we designed two studies in which participants chose between inquiring (at a cost) for expert advice from an oracle, or to search for options without guidance, under manipulations affecting the optimal choice. We found that participants showed a greater propensity to seek expert advice when it was instrumental to increase payoff (study A), and when it reduced choice uncertainty, above and beyond payoff maximization (study B). This latter result was especially apparent in participants with greater trait-level intolerance of uncertainty. Taken together, these results suggest that we seek expert advice for both economic goals (i.e., payoff maximization) and epistemic goals (i.e., uncertainty minimization) and that our decisions to ask or not ask for advice are sensitive to cost-benefit tradeoffs.
... Self-regulatory skills are also necessary to support students in tolerating the uncertainty of not knowing the answer (Jirout et al., 2018;Peterson, 2020) and engaging in information-seeking behaviours such as forming and asking questions and identifying reliable sources of knowledge (Jirout & Klahr, 2020; see also Ronfard et al., 2018). The data in this present study suggest that teachers sought to model inward and outward questions, as well as effective sequences of questions. ...
Creativity and curiosity are recognised as vital skills to prepare students to engage with the significant challenges and opportunities of the future. To address the research question "What practices do teachers enact with the aim of encouraging creativity and curiosity in primary classrooms?", 21 teachers were interviewed about their teaching practices; this data was triangulated with self-captured classroom videos from 19 classrooms in nine countries. Results of the analysis demonstrated a variety of promising classroom practices. These findings and implications for practice are discussed in terms of diverse feedback pathways, nurturing inquisitive minds, supporting self-regulatory learning and self-expression.
... Conversations between parents and children are not driven only by parents, but rather many of these conversations are started by children's questions [21]. Research in developmental psychology suggest that children's questions are key in understanding their cognition, as children use questions to fill knowledge gaps [16,17,22,23]. Therefore, children's questions might give us insight into which aspects of the pandemic children want to know more about. ...
... When addressing these questions, we also primarily focus on the importance of prior/expert knowledge and the quality of questions in receiving adequate responses from LLMs. The importance of prior knowledge for learning is a robust finding in the field of educational psychology 1,2 , and the users' prior knowledge/expertise about a given topic/problem can affect how they formulate their questions and whether or not they receive adequate responses 3,4 . Thus, it is reasonable to expect that students or educators who use ChatGPT with more accurate and comprehensive prior knowledge can find more value in their interactions with ChatGPT than users with limited or inaccurate prior knowledge. ...
There is an increasing interest in using AI-based tools in university education, particularly in software education. However, it is essential to investigate its integration into learning hard sciences such as chemistry and physics. As the multidisciplinary field of Nanotechnology continues its trajectory of growth and significance, the incorporation of cutting-edge technological tools like ChatGPT will play a crucial role. In this work, we explore the innovative use of ChatGPT as a learning and teaching tool, specifically within the realm of nanotechnology education. To this end, we use a qualitative research approach; we ask nanotechnology-related questions to ChatGPT to generate data, and we evaluate the responses we receive based on their quality and usability (i.e., correctness, relevance, and educational value). Thus, we discuss the profound effects and capabilities of ChatGPT in assisting students’ learning of complex nanotechnological concepts and educators’ enhancement of their teaching methodologies. We also highlight the opportunities, challenges, and ethical concerns.
... Help-seeking is another form of active learning because individuals must make decisions on when to seek additional information in order to improve their performance or knowledge (Gall, 1985). Help-seeking may share underlying processes with other active learning strategies, such as question asking (e.g., metacognitive processes may support the capacity to recognize knowledge gaps; Ronfard et al., 2018). Critically, despite the potential benefits of help-seeking, previous research has not directly examined how children integrate information received through actively sought help into their decision-making process. ...
The current research examined how seeking versus receiving help affected children's memory and confidence decisions. Baseline performance, when no help was available, was compared to performance when help could be sought (Experiment 1: N = 83, 41 females) or was provided (Experiment 2: N = 84, 44 females) in a sample of predominately White 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds from Northern California. Data collection occurred from 2018 to 2019. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds agreed most often with sought-help, whereas 9-year-olds were the only age group reporting lower confidence for sought-help relative to baseline trials. In Experiment 2, agreement and confidence after provided help were similar across age groups. Different developmental patterns when help was sought versus provided underscore the importance of active help-seeking for memory decision-making.
... This learning experience will be brought by the child when entering advanced education (13), for example such question "why does the form of water change and follow the place where the water is located". The children will continue to ask the question until they find different forms (14)(15)(16)(17) of water and the content or volume remains the same. This is the discovery activity carried out by children in learning, where children study and find answers to "why this and why so" for the question and curiosity of the child. ...
The two horrible conditions ahead of time than the organizers worldwide are to diminish the stack at the conventional fills and to reduce the continually developing basic spoiling. This test is proposed to discover probably the execution of the DI diesel motor at various loads when fuelled with mixes of palm methyl esters and diesel. The primers have been pushed on a completely utilized diesel motor without changes. Every one of the appraisals were consistent usa of america and outfitted toward dependable pace. The impact of moving weight develop to be assessed the volume that brake warm temperature ability, mass flow rate, brake one of a kind gas use and fumes gas temperature. Exploratory impacts show that at complete weight conditions, the B-20, B-40and B-60 mixes bring 33.23%, 32.81%, 32.39% and 31.ninety seven% higher brake heat usefulness than sole diesel freely. It wound up confirmed that the brake warmth ability of palm biodiesel is higher than that of diesel, and it is a delayed consequence of the oxygenated atom of biodiesel which acknowledges total ingesting of the biodiesel fuel. In addition the mass development rate of biodiesel is evidently superior to anything that of diesel fuel; it is through method for exact capacity of the calorific estimation of biodiesel is a ton parcels less appeared in one another way as far as diesel gas. At the reason for results obtained from this test utilizing palm biodiesel as a fuel is proposed for the utilized as a piece of a diesel motor with diesel mixes.
... On the level of learner behavior, question-asking is relevant to both weaving apprenticeship and school. Children's question-asking is highly valued in school situations (Ronfard et al., 2018). However, it can be considered a mark of disrespect in more Gemeinschaft communities, such as immigrant agricultural workers in California (Delgado-Gaitan, 1994). ...
Analyzing three sets of video data collected in one Maya community, we examined apprenticeship and learning of backstrap loom weaving over three generations spanning the years 1970 to 2012. Like many cultural groups, the Maya of Chiapas are experiencing rapid sociodemographic shifts. Three generations of girls (N = 134) were observed at their looms: in the 1970 subsistence economy; in the transition to a commercial economy in the 1990s; and in 2012, when the commercial economy required formal education. Multilevel models showed that intergenerational sociodemographic change - increased time in school, greater involvement in the money economy, and decreased family size - changed weaving apprenticeship, which, in turn, was related to changes in characteristics of learners. In 2012, weaving learners received more explanations, praise, and body instruction from their teachers. Learners, in turn, asked more questions. However, these changes came at a cost - the gradual loss of weaving as an everyday subsistence practice and art form. Tracing intergenerational change over three generations, this study makes a unique contribution to an understanding of cultural evolution.
... A second salient point is that other studies of information demand can appear quite different from those in Figure 1b, but share the step of information selection and thus address very similar questions (Coenen et al., 2019). A rich literature studies question-asking abilities using tasks in which children are presented with realistic scenarios that have some uncertainty (e.g., "Tommy was late for school today") and can choose which question to ask (which source to inspect) to resolve the uncertainty (e.g., "to understand why, would you like to ask about the weather or Tommy's new car?" Ronfarda et al., 2018). Other studies task adults with making economic decisions or categorization decisions (e.g., "Is this an animal of type A or B?") and allow them to request observations to resolve their uncertainty (e.g., "Would you like to observe the animal's fur or their paws to make the decision?" ...
I review recent literature on information demand and its implications for attention control. I argue that this literature motivates a view of attention as a mechanism that reduces uncertainty by selectively sampling sensory stimuli on the basis of expected information gain (EIG). I discuss emerging evidence on how individuals estimate the two quantities that determine EIG, prior uncertainty and stimulus diagnosticity (predictive accuracy). I also discuss the neural mechanisms that compute EIG and integrate it with rewards in frontoparietal, executive, and neuromodulatory circuits. I end by considering the implications of this framework for a broader understanding of the factors that assign relevance to sensory stimuli and the role of attention in decision making and other cognitive functions.
... However, consistent responsive parental behavior across infancy has been suggested to facilitate infants' object exploration (Landry et al., 2003). Furthermore, responding to children's interests and EC encouraged them to ask more questions and seek information (for review, see Torrance, 1966;Ronfard et al., 2018). A recent study showed that asking questions is a fundamental and important tool for children to express EC (Alaimi et al., 2020). ...
Curiosity, the desire to learn new information, has a powerful effect on children’s learning. Parental interactions facilitate curiosity-driven behaviors in young children, such as self-exploration and question-asking, at a certain time. Furthermore, parenting quality predicts better academic outcomes. However, it is still unknown whether persistent parenting quality is related to children’s trait epistemic curiosity (EC). The current study examined whether parenting practices, responsiveness, and demandingness are cross-sectionally related to the trait EC of children in different age groups (preschoolers, younger and older school-aged children). We adopted a shortened Japanese version of the parenting style questionnaire and modified the trait EC questionnaire in young children. A sample of 244 caregivers (87.37% mothers) of children (ages 3–12) was recruited through educational institutions in Japan and reported on their parenting practices and trait EC. All data analyses were performed using SPSS version 26. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed to determine the explanatory variables for children’s trait EC. Self-reported parental responsiveness significantly explained EC scores. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show a cross-sectional relationship between parental responsiveness and children’s trait EC. Future research should clarify whether parental responsiveness in early childhood predicts children’s EC later in life.
... tions fruitful vehicles for language learning. Indeed, building on other recent studies (Ronfard et al., 2018), Justice et al. (2018) found teachers' communication-facilitating talk to be the primary predictor of children's vocabulary learning from preschool to kindergarten. Framed by Vygotskian thinking, these links to vocabulary may lie in the extent to which teachers' conversations implicitly and/or explicitly scaffold children's emerging word knowledge (Dickinson et al., 2019). ...
Back-and-forth conversations with adults are critical for developing children's language, and, therefore, an important part of the early childhood classroom learning environment; however, the specific nature of teacher feedback, one component of teacher–child conversations, on child language has not been widely studied. This article examined preschool teacher–child conversations during interactive book reading. We coded and analyzed the frequency and content of teacher talk, including feedback, among 20 teachers (11 who participated in a language and literacy intervention; 9 in business-as-usual instruction). Findings revealed that, particularly when teachers were guided on how to initiate and sustain intentional conversations, more conversations took place and were associated with higher overall classroom quality on a commonly used global assessment (the Classroom Assessment Scoring System); likewise, more teacher feedback occurred in intervention classrooms. The frequency of teacher feedback was uniquely linked to children's vocabulary learning on standardized measures beyond the effects of global classroom quality. Findings support the importance of understanding and supporting teacher feedback as an essential part of classroom conversations.
... When humans acquire knowledge about the world, asking questions and explicitly acquiring knowledge are important skills involved (Chouinard et al., 2007;Ronfard et al., 2018). Inspired by this, we explored methods to dynamically increase knowledge in image recognition by asking questions. ...
In real-world object recognition, there are numerous object classes to be recognized. Conventional image recognition based on supervised learning can only recognize object classes that exist in the training data, and thus has limited applicability in the real world. On the other hand, humans can recognize novel objects by asking questions and acquiring knowledge about them. Inspired by this, we study a framework for acquiring external knowledge through question generation that would help the model instantly recognize novel objects. Our pipeline consists of two components: the Object Classifier, which performs knowledge-based object recognition, and the Question Generator, which generates knowledge-aware questions to acquire novel knowledge. We also propose a question generation strategy based on the confidence of the knowledge-aware prediction of the Object Classifier. To train the Question Generator, we construct a dataset that contains knowledge-aware questions about objects in the images. Our experiments show that the proposed pipeline effectively acquires knowledge about novel objects compared to several baselines.
... Looking beyond age, we were also interested in how background knowledge relates to children's evidence evaluation. Children with more domain-specific knowledge are more effective at asking relevant questions (Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015) and they may be better at evaluating the information they receive (Ronfard, Zambrana, Hermansen, & Kelemen, 2018;Sandoval et al., 2014). Children also make use of background knowledge to make inferences about causal mechanisms in animals (Hayes & Thompson, 2007). ...
Being able to identify causally relevant evidence is essential in order to evaluate scientific claims, yet doing so can be challenging, especially for children. In some cases, identifying causally relevant evidence can involve recognizing similarities in context and causal mechanisms underlying seemingly different observations. Two studies explore how children ages 7-10 (n = 98) judge the relevance of different observations for evaluating the accuracy of a scientific explanation. Observations varied based on topic (i.e., the same animal as the explanation or a different species) and the presence or absence of the same underlying causal mechanism as the target explanation. All children recognized that observations involving the same process in the same animal would be helpful. However, children ages 7-8 held a more fragile understanding than children ages 9-10 that observations involving a different animal but the same causal mechanism would be more helpful than observations involving the same animal but a different causal mechanism. Implications for conceptual development and scientific reasoning are discussed.
... This might be because the confounded evidence task not only requires tracking cause-and-effect relations but also engages key components of the scientific inquiry process, including (a) noticing that a given causal relation is ambiguous and (b) producing an informative disambiguating intervention (Zimmerman, 2007). Moreover, sensitivity to information gaps has been established as a first step in question-asking behavior (Ronfard, Zambrana, Hermansen, & Kelemen, 2018), which is a critical medium for acquiring early science knowledge both in everyday life through parents (e.g., Callanan & Jipson, 2001;Harris & Koenig, 2006) and in kindergarten science activities (e.g., Samarapungavan et al., 2011). That said, the measurement characteristics of the confounded evidence task were unique relative to the other causal reasoning tasks as a result of its reliance on a single continuous record of response time as opposed to cumulative accuracy across a small number of discrete trials. ...
Although early causal reasoning has been studied extensively, inconsistency in the tasks used to assess it has clouded our understanding of its structure, development, and relevance to broader developmental outcomes. The current research attempted to bring clarity to these questions by exploring patterns of performance across several commonly used measures of causal reasoning, and their relation to scientific literacy, in a sample of 3- to 5-year-old children from diverse backgrounds (N = 153). A longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis revealed that some measures of causal reasoning (counterfactual reasoning, causal learning, and causal inference), but not all of them (tracking cause–effect associations and resolving confounded evidence), assess a unidimensional factor and that this resulting factor was relatively stable across time. A cross-lagged panel model analysis revealed associations between causal reasoning and scientific literacy across each age tested. Causal reasoning and scientific literacy related to each other concurrently, and each predicted the other in subsequent years. These relations could not be accounted for by children’s broader cognitive skills. Implications for early STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) engagement and success are discussed.
While improving teachers’ questioning skills and techniques should be the primary focus in professional development, it is equally crucial for teachers to help children recognize that some questions are more effective for learning than others and that asking with a purpose leads to a deeper understanding. Well-formulated questions and the ability to discern which questions are worth posing are also essential components of developing into an autonomous learner and decision-maker. The collaborative case study presented here, conducted by a university researcher and an early childhood teacher, responded to calls for research into children’s questions across diverse cultural contexts and with a variety of methodologies. Through qualitative data collection and analysis over a five-month period, the study had the advantage of tracking the learning journey of a group of 4- and 5-year-olds in a Greek early childhood setting, from repeating each other’s questions to asking purposeful questions in various contexts and documenting how children’s questioning skills were co-constructed in context. Through examples of critical incidents and samples of children’s efforts, the paper discusses the strategies that supported children in posing more effective questions and illustrates how the surrounding conversational and social environment can facilitate the improvement of question-asking.
With age, people increasingly emphasize intent when judging transgressions. However, people often lack information about intent in everyday settings; further, they may wonder about reasons underlying pro‐social acts. Three studies investigated 4‐to‐6‐year‐olds', 7‐to‐9‐year‐olds', and adults' (data collected 2020–2022 in the northeastern United States, total n = 669, ~50% female, predominantly White) desire for information about why behaviors occurred. In Study 1, older children and adults exhibited more curiosity about transgressions versus pro‐social behaviors ( d s = 0.52–0.63). Younger children showed weaker preferences to learn about transgressions versus pro‐social behaviors than did older participants ( d = 0.12). Older children's emphasis on intent, but not expectation violations, drove age‐related differences (Studies 2–3). Older children may target intent‐related judgments specifically toward transgressions, and doing so may underlie curiosity about wrongdoing.
Children demonstrate a remarkable capacity for both intellectual and interpersonal curiosity, reflecting their desires to know about the physical, material, and natural world and about the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of other people. Yet the study of curiosity and its educational applications have focused almost exclusively on the former, even though interpersonal curiosity may be critical for social emotional learning, human connection, and the capacity to understand and take the perspective of others. In this paper, we review the research on intellectual and interpersonal curiosity, focusing on the latter and including our own research that indicates that it is associated with social emotional wellbeing, academic engagement, and a sense of common humanity (Author, 2023; Authors, 2024). We also review research on how ecological contexts (e.g., of families and schools) shape curiosity, how contextual variation may lead to individual variation (i.e., by gender and age), and offer directions for future research.
Children frequently use Google to answer their questions, yet what they think about Google's capacity and limitations is unclear. This study explores children's beliefs about Google's capacity to answer questions. American children ages 9 and 10 (n = 44; 18 boys and 26 girls) viewed factual questions directed towards Google or a person. After viewing each question, they reported their confidence in the informant's accuracy, the time it would take the informant to obtain the answer and how the informant would obtain the answer. Finally, they generated questions that the internet would be capable or incapable of answering. Children believed Google would be more accurate and faster than a person at answering questions. Children consistently generated appropriate questions that the internet would be good at answering, but they sometimes struggled to generate questions that the internet would not be good at answering. Implications for children's learning are discussed.
In the last ten years, studies of the representation of moral values in English textbooks have been growing. However, little empirical evidence reveals the use of speech acts to represent moral values through utterances. This study aims to investigate the representation of moral values depicted through utterances in English textbooks for elementary school grades 2 and 5 in Indonesia. By adopting a socio-cognitive critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2015) framework integrated with Searle’s (1969) speech acts, this qualitative study elucidates the representation of moral values only in the verbal text. The data were analyzed by applying several steps, including unitizing, sampling, recording/coding, reducing, inferring, and narrating. The findings of this study showed that curiosity, honesty, and friendliness are the most dominant moral values depicted in two English textbooks for elementary schools in Indonesia. Dialogue/conversation, chapter cover, and instruction for students’ activity are the strategies to promote moral values in the textbooks. This study implies that teachers and textbook writers should provide students with more examples of moral values, particularly those related to daily life communication.
Question asking has been a critical tool for teaching and learning since the time of Socrates and is important in the creative problem-solving process. Yet, its role in creativity has insofar not been thoroughly explored. The current study assessed the role of question asking in the creative process. A correlational preregistered design was used to administer the alternative questions task (AQT) to explore its relation to cognitive and creative divergent thinking tasks. In the AQT—which is based on Torrance’s unusual questions task—participants are asked to generate creative and unusual questions for common objects. Responses are rated for their question level using the Bloom’s taxonomy, a widely accepted guideline in designing examination questions of differing levels of complexity, as well as their subjective and objective creativity. A significant positive relation between AQT question level and objective and subjective creativity scores was found: Higher, more complex questions were more creative, with the inverse effect for lower-level questions. We interpret these findings as supporting the hypothesis that higher question complexity is related and predictive of creative ability. A second study replicated and generalized our findings. Thus, our findings uniquely highlight the role of question asking, and especially question complexity, in creativity.
This PALART volume makes an original addition to the Series as it opens a stimulating window on the Asia-Pacific region of the world by bringing together a great deal of empirical and theoretical new work in Second Language Acquisition within the Processability Theory (PT) framework. Readers will be pleasantly surprised to be able to access, within one publication, so much novel and overview information on SLA while maintaining its focus on PT, its theoretical developments including its 2005 (Pienemann et al.) and 2015 (Bettoni & Di Biase) extensions and how they relate to PT’s foundation work (Pienemann 1998), as well as its applications to language learning and teaching in Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Malay and English in countries of the Asia-Pacific region including Australia. This volume demonstrates the vitality and the dynamic nature of PT and its potential as a tool for understanding SLA both theory and practice.
Infants are drawn to events that violate their expectations about the world: they look longer at physically impossible events, such as when a car passes through a wall. Here, we examined whether individual differences in infants’ visual preferences for physically impossible events reflect an early form of curiosity, and asked whether caregivers’ behaviors, parenting styles, and everyday routines relate to these differences. In Study 1, we presented infants (N = 47, Mage = 16.83 months, range = 10.29–24.59 months) with events that violated physical principles and closely matched possible events. We measured infants’ everyday curiosity and related experiences (i.e., caregiver curiosity-promoting activities) through a newly developed curiosity scale, The Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale (EMCS). Infants’ looking preferences for physically impossible events were positively associated with their score on the EMCS, but not their temperament, vocabulary, or caregiver trait curiosity. In Study 2A, we set out to better understand the relation between the EMCS and infants’ looking preferences for physically impossible events by assessing the underlying structure of the EMCS with a larger sample of children (N = 211, Mage = 47.63 months, range = 10.29–78.97 months). An exploratory factor analysis revealed that children’s curiosity was comprised four factors: Social Curiosity, Broad Exploration, Persistence, and Information-Seeking. Relatedly, caregiver curiosity-promoting activities were composed of five factors: Flexible Problem-Solving, Cognitive Stimulation, Diverse Daily Activities, Child-Directed Play, and Awe-Inducing Activities. In Study 2B (N = 42 infants from Study 1), we examined which aspects of infant curiosity and caregiver behavior predicted infants’ looking preferences using the factor structures of the EMCS. Findings revealed that infants’ looking preferences were uniquely related to infants’ Broad Exploration and caregivers’ Awe-Inducing Activities (e.g., nature walks with infants, museum outings). These exploratory findings indicate that infants’ visual preferences for physically impossible events may reflect an early form of curiosity, which is related to the curiosity-stimulating environments provided by caregivers. Moreover, this work offers a new comprehensive tool, the Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale, that can be used to measure both curiosity and factors related to its development, starting in infancy and extending into childhood.
Although children's sensitivity to others' informativeness emerges early in life, their active information search becomes robustly efficient only around age 10. Young children's difficulty in asking efficient questions has often been hypothesized to be linked to their developing verbal competence and growing vocabulary. In this paper, we offer for the first time a quantitative analysis of 4- to 6-year-old children's information search competence by using a non-verbal version of the 20-questions game, to gain a more comprehensive and fair picture of their active learning abilities. Our results show that, even in this version, preschoolers performed worse than simulated random agents, requiring more queries to reach the solution. However, crucially, preschoolers performed better than the simulated random agents when isolating the extra, unnecessary queries, which are made after only one hypothesis is left. When additionally isolating all the unnecessary queries, children's performance looked on par with that of the simulated optimal agents. Our study replicates and enriches previous research, showing an increase in efficiency across the preschool-aged years, but also a general lack of optimality that seems to be fundamentally driven by children's strong tendency to make unnecessary queries, rather than by their verbal immaturity. We discuss how children's non-optimal, conservative information-search strategies may be adaptive, after all.
For more than three decades, researchers have characterized the dramatic changes in early cognitive development and the learning mechanisms that underlie those changes by analogy to the thinking of professional scientists. This “child-as-scientist” view has emphasized the parallels between: (1) the evidence-based, theoretical nature of both children’s and scientists’ knowledge, (2) the rational process by which that knowledge is updated and revised, and (3) conceptual change, the often radical alterations to epistemic content that can result from those revisions. In this chapter, we begin by laying out the fundamentals of scientific thinking and reasoning, situating it in an “interventionist” framework of causal reasoning. Next, we review the history of the “child-as-scientist” approach in this context. Then, we outline recent work, open questions, and future directions in research on the development of scientific thinking in infancy, early childhood, and beyond.
We investigated children's information seeking in response to a surprising claim (Study 1, N = 109, 54 Female, Range = 4.02—6.94 years, 49% White, 21% Mixed Ethnicity, 19% Southeast Asian, September 2019—March 2020; Study 2, N = 154, 74 Female, Range = 4.09—7.99, 50% White, 20% Mixed Ethnicity, 17% Southeast Asian, September 2020—December 2020). Relative to younger children, older children more often expressed skepticism about the adult's surprising claims (1‐year increase, OR = 2.70) and more often suggested exploration strategies appropriate for testing the specific claim they heard (1‐year increase, OR = 1.42). Controlling for age, recommending more targeted exploration strategies was associated with a greater likelihood of expressing skepticism about the adult's claim.
Young children’s questions may offer powerful leverage for knowledge acquisition and deep level learning, yet often go unrecognised and undervalued in early childhood education (ECE) settings. When young children’s questions are not heard or respected, they are denied their UNCRC Article 12 right to express their views freely and have ‘due weight’ accorded to them. A pilot case study framed by critical pedagogy and young children’s rights perspectives was conducted in the Midlands region of England to investigate the nature and extent of young children’s questioning in ECE settings and its relationship with knowledge acquisition and learning. Early childhood students recorded questions young children (n = 9) (2.2–4.5 years) asked in ECE settings. Four categories of young children’s questions emerged, two oriented to knowledge acquisition and learning. Evidence also revealed effects of performativity impeding knowledge acquisition and learning by both adults and young children in ECE settings. Further study is indicated.
Children ask many questions, but do not always receive answers to the questions they ask. We were interested in whether the act of generating questions, in the absence of an answer, is related to children’s later thinking. Two experiments examined whether children retain the questions they ask in working memory, and whether the type of questions asked relate to their categorization. Four to ten-year-old children (N = 42 in Experiment 1, N = 41 in Experiment 2) were shown 12 novel objects, asked three questions about each, and did not receive answers to their questions. Children recalled their questions in the first experiment and categorized variants of the novel objects in the second experiment. We found that children have robust working memory for their questions, indicating that these questions may relate to their subsequent thinking. Additionally, children generalize category boundaries more narrowly or broadly depending on the type of question they ask, indicating that children’s questions may reflect an underlying bias in how they think about the world. These findings suggest that future research should examine questions in the absence of answers to understand how inquiry affects children’s cognitive development.
Children’s questions to their caregivers—and caregivers’ questions to their children—play an important role in child development. For children on the autism spectrum, who often experience cognitive, linguistic, and social difficulties, prior research on questions has resulted in inconsistent and incomplete findings. This study characterized the frequency, form, and function of queries posed by children on the autism spectrum ( n = 12), non-spectrum peers ( n = 20), and parents, using the Nadig ASD English Corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Results suggested that children on the autism spectrum and their caregivers produced fewer questions than non-spectrum dyads; however, whereas wh-questions were underrepresented in the repertoire of children on the spectrum, they were overrepresented in the repertoire of their parents. Finally, question function was similarly diverse for parents and children across groups. These findings offer important clinical implications for question-asking interventions targeting this population.
There is a great interest in studying creativity in children. Yet, the current literature on preschool creativity is sparse. Extending on work in the innovation literature, we propose that uncertainty, curiosity, and exploration are vital components of a larger model of creativity. In the current chapter, we examine this new model of creativity and its implications for preschool children. Specifically, we propose that play is an ideal context for supporting the components of the creativity model. We investigate challenges in implementing the model in educational settings and explore outstanding questions in the field of preschool creativity.
This chapter focuses on the role and value of not knowing for creativity, learning and development. More specifically, it proposes a typology of states that are conducive, in different ways, for creative learning, including certain knowing, uncertain not knowing, uncertain knowing, and certain not knowing. They are discussed, in turn, in relation to four associated experiences: trust, anxiety, curiosity and wonder, respectively. Towards the end, two models are proposed that specify how and when these experiences contribute to the process of creative learning. The first is focused on macro stages, the second on micro processes. While the former starts from uncertain not knowing, goes through the interplay between uncertain knowing and certain not knowing, and ends in certain knowledge, the processual model reveals the intricate relations between these experiences in each and every instance of creative learning. The developmental and educational implications of revaluing not knowing as a generate state are discussed in the end.KeywordsUncertaintyKnowledgeAnxietyTrustCuriosityWonderCreative learning
Although children often believe an adult’s claims, they may have opportunities to check these claims by gathering relevant empirical evidence themselves. Here, we examine whether children seize such opportunities, especially when the claim is counterintuitive. Chinese preschool and elementary schoolchildren were presented with five different-sized Russian dolls and asked to indicate the heaviest doll. Almost all children selected the biggest doll. Half of the children then heard a false, counterintuitive claim (i.e., smallest = heaviest). The remaining children heard a claim confirming their initial intuition (i.e., biggest = heaviest). Children in both age groups typically endorsed the experimenter’s claim even when it was counterintuitive. However, during the experimenter’s subsequent absence, elementary schoolchildren explored the dolls more if they had received counterintuitive rather than confirming testimony whereas preschool children rarely explored, no matter what testimony they had received. Thus, with increasing age, children seize opportunities to test counterintuitive claims.
The current study investigates whether preschoolers are able to successfully identify the most effective among given questions, adapting their reliance on different types of questions (constraint-seeking vs. hypothesis-scanning) based on the quantitative measure of expected information gain. Children were presented with storybooks describing the reasons why a fictional character, Toma, was late to school over several days. In 3 experiments with 5-year-old children, we manipulated the frequency and likelihoods of the reasons presented. Children were asked to identify which of 2 given questions would be more effective in finding out why Toma was late to school again. In a fourth experiment, we investigated whether preschoolers are adaptive learners, that is, whether they can identify the most effective question iteratively, and we extended our investigation to younger preschoolers (3- and 4-year-olds). We find that children assessed the effectiveness of different types of questions based on the hypothesis space currently under consideration, and this adaptation may be guided by expected information gain. Overall, our results suggest that over the preschool years, children begin to develop the computational foundations that support successful question-asking strategies.
These studies explore elementary-school-aged children’s ability to evaluate circular explanations and whether they respond to receiving weak explanations by expressing interest in additional learning. In the first study, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds (n = 53) heard why questions about unfamiliar animals. For each question, they rated the quality of single explanations and later selected the best explanation between pairs of circular and noncircular explanations. When judging single explanations, 8- and 10-year-olds, and to some extent 6-year-olds, provided higher ratings for noncircular explanations compared to circular ones. When selecting between pairs of explanations, all age groups preferred noncircular explanations to circular ones, but older children did so more consistently than 6-year-olds. Children who recognized the weakness of the single circular explanations were more interested in receiving additional information about the question topics. In Study 2, all three age groups (n = 87) provided higher ratings for noncircular explanations compared to circular ones when listening to responses to how questions, but older children showed a greater distinction in their ratings than 6-year-olds. Moreover, the link between recognizing circular explanations as weak and interest in future learning could not be accounted for solely by individual differences in verbal intelligence. These findings illustrate the developmental trajectory of explanation evaluation and support that recognition of weak explanations is linked to interest in future learning across the elementary years. Implications for education are discussed.
Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children’s information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults search for information. To do so, we develop a hierarchical version of the 20-questions game, in which participants either ask questions (Study 1) or test individual objects (Study 2) to discover which category of objects within a nested structure (e.g., animals, birds, or owls) has a novel property. We also develop a computational model of the task, which allows us to evaluate performance in quantitative terms. As expected, we find developmental improvement in the efficiency of information search. In addition, we show that participants’ performance exceeds random search, but falls short of optimal performance. We find mixed support for the idea that children’s inefficiency stems from difficulty thinking beyond the level of individual objects or hypotheses. Instead, we reveal a previously undocumented source of developmental change: Children are significantly more likely than adults to continue their search for information beyond the point at which a single hypothesis remains, and thus to ask questions and select objects associated with zero information gain. This suggests that one crucial source of developmental change in information search efficiency lies in children’s “stopping rules.”
Humans adapt their behavior not only by observing the consequences of their actions but also by internally monitoring their performance. This capacity, termed metacognitive sensitivity [1, 2], has traditionally been denied to young children because they have poor capacities in verbally reporting their own mental states [3–5]. Yet, these observations might reflect children’s limited capacities for explicit self-reports, rather than limitations in metacognition per se. Indeed, metacognitive sensitivity has been shown to reflect simple computational mechanisms [1, 6–8], and can be found in various non-verbal species [7–10]. Thus, it might be that this faculty is present early in development, although it would be discernible through implicit behaviors and neural indices rather than explicit self-reports. Here, by relying on such non-verbal indices, we show that 12- and 18-month-old infants internally monitor the accuracy of their own decisions. At the behavioral level, infants showed increased persistence in their initial choice after making a correct as compared to an incorrect response, evidencing an appropriate evaluation of decision confidence. Moreover, infants were able to use decision confidence adaptively to either confirm their initial choice or change their mind. At the neural level, we found that a well-established electrophysiological signature of error monitoring in adults, the error-related negativity, is similarly elicited when infants make an incorrect choice. Hence, although explicit forms of metacognition mature later during childhood, infants already estimate decision confidence, monitor their errors, and use these metacognitive evaluations to regulate subsequent behavior.
Four studies explored the abilities of 80 adults and 180 children (4–9 years), from predominantly middle-class families in the Northeastern United States, to use information about machines’ observable functional capacities to infer their internal, “hidden” mechanistic complexity. Children as young as 4 and 5 years old used machines’ numbers of functions as indications of complexity and matched machines performing more functions with more complex “insides” (Study 1). However, only older children (6 and older) and adults used machines’ functional diversity alone as an indication of complexity (Studies 2–4). The ability to use functional diversity as a complexity cue therefore emerges during the early school years, well before the use of diversity in most categorical induction tasks.
Judgments about objects in the world are often based on probabilistic information (or cues). A frugal
judgment strategy that utilizes memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between known and unknown
objects) as a cue for inference is the recognition heuristic (RH). The usefulness of the RH depends on
the structure of the environment, particularly the predictive power (validity) of recognition. Little is
known about developmental differences in use of the RH. In this study, the authors examined (a) to what
extent children and adolescents recruit the RH when making judgments, and (b) around what age adaptive
use of the RH emerges. Primary schoolchildren (M = 9 years), younger adolescents (M = 12 years), and
older adolescents (M = 17 years) made comparative judgments in task environments with either high or
low recognition validity. Reliance on the RH was measured with a hierarchical multinomial model.
Results indicated that primary schoolchildren already made systematic use of the RH. However, only
older adolescents adaptively adjusted their strategy use between environments and were better able to
discriminate between situations in which the RH led to correct versus incorrect inferences. These findings
suggest that the use of simple heuristics does not progress unidirectionally across development but
strongly depends on the task environment, in line with the perspective of ecological rationality.
Moreover, adaptive heuristic inference seems to require experience and a developed base of domain
knowledge.
The current research focuses on how children’s inquiry may be affected by how they learn about which sources are likely to provide accurate, helpful information. Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) were tasked with asking two different puppet informants – one knowledgeable and one not knowledgeable – questions to determine which of four pictures was inside of a set of boxes. Before beginning the task, children learned about the knowledge status of the two informants in one of three learning conditions: (a) by witnessing how the informants answered sample questions (i.e., show condition), (b) by being told what informants knew (i.e., tell condition), or (c) by both (i.e., show & tell condition). Five-year-olds outperformed 4-year-olds on most parts of the inquiry process. Overall, children were less certain about which informant had been most helpful when they found out that information solely via observation as compared to when they had some third-party information about the informant knowledge. However, children adjusted their questioning strategies appropriately, more frequently asking questions that served to double check the answers they were receiving in the observation only condition. In sum, children were highly resilient, adjusting their questioning strategies based on the information provided, leading to no overall differences in their accuracy of determining the contents of the boxes between the three learning conditions. Implications for learning from others are discussed.
Significance
Although many animals have been shown to monitor their own uncertainty, only humans seem to have the ability to explicitly communicate their uncertainty to others. It remains unknown whether this ability is present early in development, or whether it only emerges later alongside language development. Here, using a nonverbal memory-monitoring paradigm, we show that infants are able to strategically ask for help to avoid making mistakes. These findings reveal that infants are capable of monitoring and communicating their own uncertainty. We propose that explicit metacognition develops earlier than previously thought, enabling infants to communicate their own uncertainty nonverbally to gain knowledge from others.
Young children show competence in reasoning about how ownership affects object use. In the present experiments, we investigate how influential ownership is for young children by examining their explanations. In three experiments, we asked 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 323) to explain why it was acceptable (Experiments 1-3) or unacceptable (Experiment 2 and 3) for a person to use an object. In Experiments 1 and 2, older preschoolers referenced ownership more than alternative considerations when explaining why it was acceptable or unacceptable for a person to use an object, even though ownership was not mentioned to them. In Experiment 3, ownership was mentioned to children. Here, younger preschoolers frequently referenced ownership when explaining unacceptability of using an object, but not when explaining why using it was acceptable. These findings suggest that ownership is influential in preschoolers' explanations about the acceptability of using objects, but that the scope of its influence increases with age.
Four tasks (N = 191, 3-6-year-olds) examined the effect of instrumental versus conventional language cues on children’s imitative fidelity of a necklace-making activity, their memory and transmission of the activity, and their perceptions of functional fixedness. Children in the conventional condition imitated with higher fidelity, transmitted more of the modeled behavior, and showed higher levels of functional fixedness than children in the instrumental
condition. There were no differences in children’s memory of the activity between conditions demonstrating that memory alone does not explain differences in imitative fidelity. The data demonstrate that children’s interpretation of behavior as instrumental or conventional has wideranging implications for what children imitate, what they transmit to others, and how they reason about objects’ functions.
The ability to categorize information is essential to everyday tasks such as identifying the cause of an event given a set of likely explanations or pinpointing the correct from a set of possible diagnoses by sequentially probing questions. In three studies, we investigated how the level of inclusiveness at which objects are presented (basic-level vs. subordinate-level) influences children's (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults' performance in a sequential binary categorization task. Study 1 found a robust facilitating effect of basic-level objects on the ability to ask effective questions in a computerized version of the Twenty Questions game. Study 2 suggested that this facilitating effect might be due to the kinds of object-differentiating features participants generate when provided with basic-level as compared to subordinate-level objects. Study 3 ruled out the alternative hypothesis that basic-level objects facilitate the selection of the most efficient among a given set of features.
For cases in which precise information is practically or actually unknowable, certainty and precision can indicate a lack of competence, while expressions of ignorance may indicate greater expertise. In two experiments, we investigated whether children and adults are able to use this " virtuous ignorance " as a cue to expertise. Experiment 1 found that adults and children older than 9 years selected confident informants for knowable information and ignorant informants for unknowable information. However, 5-7-year-olds overwhelmingly favored a confident informant, even when such precision was completely implausible. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that 5-8-year-olds and adults are both able to distinguish between knowable and unknowable items when asked how difficult the information would be to acquire, but those same children still failed to reject the precise and confident informant for unknowable items. We suggest that children have difficulty integrating information about the knowability of particular facts into their evaluations of expertise.
Given the overwhelming quantity of information available from the environment, how do young learners know what to learn about and what to ignore? We found that 11-month-old infants (N = 110) used violations of prior expectations as special opportunities for learning. The infants were shown events that violated expectations about object behavior or events that were nearly identical but did not violate expectations. The sight of an object that violated expectations enhanced learning and promoted information-seeking behaviors; specifically, infants learned more effectively about objects that committed violations, explored those objects more, and engaged in hypothesis-testing behaviors that reflected the particular kind of violation seen. Thus, early in life, expectancy violations offer a wedge into the problem of what to learn.
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Children’s access to sexual knowledge has always been considered ‘risky’ and
controversial due to the fraught relationship between childhood and sexuality. Based on focus groups
with children and their parents, the authors explore the relationship between risk and regulation
associated with providing children with accurate knowledge about sexuality. Two main issues are
examined: parents’ anxieties associated with educating their children about sexuality; and how children
actively build narratives around relationships and sexual knowledge based on the fragments of
information available to them. The authors argue that dominant constructions of childhood and
childhood innocence negate the effective education of children around sexuality, gender and ethical
relationships. Additionally, they examine the tensions that exist for many parents around the discourse
of child protection and the ways in which this impacts on their education of young children about
sexual matters.
This study examines the socialization of student question-asking behavior, one aspect of learning how to learn in school. Good (1981) argues that because of differential teacher feedback, some students learn to become intellectually passive in classrooms. The study documents students' self-initiated questions in an attempt to determine whether high- and low-potential students learn different questioning skills. To examine this question, we developed a coding system to differentiate nine types of questions students in grades K-12 ask. The system also identified target students to allow comparisons of students by ability (teachers' ratings) and sex across different types of questions. Twelve observations were made in each of 22 classrooms. Findings indicate that students in grades K-12 asked similar numbers of questions; however, the distribution of those questions varied somewhat with grade level. Requests for meaningful explanations were relatively infrequent at all grade levels, and procedural questions were relatively frequent at all grade levels. Male kindergarten students and students perceived by teachers to be low-achieving asked many more questions than female kindergarteners and all high-achieving students. As age increased, female students asked about the same number of questions as male students; however, low-achieving students over time asked fewer questions than students at other achievement levels, which provides some support for Good's (1981) passivity model.
Children are frequently faced with problems that they cannot immediately solve on their own. For some of these problems, children can learn from listening to claims and advice from others. Indeed, sometimes they need not do anything but passively attend to what they are told or what they overhear to learn something new (e.g., Mills, Danovitch, Grant, & Elashi, 2012). However, in many other situations, children must actively seek information from others by asking questions. Although prior work has shown that children begin to ask questions at a very young age (Chouinard, 2007 includes a substantial review), less is known about the extent to which they can use questions as tools to gather information from appropriate sources for problem solving and learning. How adept are children at formulating effective questions and seeking out enough information to resolve their problems? How much do they take into account the trustworthiness or reliability of an informant when deciding whether or not to ask that informant questions? This chapter examines developmental and individual differences in the ability to question the most knowledgeable, accurate sources when problem solving.
Little is known about the mechanisms underlying a ubiquitous behavior in preschoolers, help-seeking. We tested the hypothesis that preschoolers' awareness of their own uncertainty is associated with help-seeking. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N = 125) completed a perceptual identification task twice: once independently and once when they could request help from a confederate whose competence level was manipulated. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants sought help more frequently on trials for which, when required to answer independently, they expressed lower confidence. Children in the bad-helper condition were slower to respond after receiving help than those in the good-helper condition. Finally, females and children with more advanced theory of mind were more likely to seek help, identifying additional factors that relate to help-seeking.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Children and adults make rich causal inferences about the physical and social world, even in novel situations where they cannot rely on prior knowledge of causal mechanisms. We propose that this capacity is supported in part by constraints provided by event structure—the cognitive organization of experience into discrete events that are hierarchically organized. These event-structured causal inferences are guided by a level-matching principle, with events conceptualized at one level of an event hierarchy causally matched to other events at that same level, and a boundary-blocking principle, with events causally matched to other events that are parts of the same superordinate event. These principles are used to constrain inferences about plausible causal candidates in unfamiliar situations, both in diagnosing causes (Experiment 1) and predicting effects (Experiment 2). The results could not be explained by construal level (Experiment 3) or similarity-matching (Experiment 4), and were robust across a variety of physical and social causal systems. Taken together, these experiments demonstrate a novel way in which noncausal information we extract from the environment can help to constrain inferences about causal structure.
The majority of current developmental models prioritise a pedagogical approach to knowledge acquisition in infancy, in which infants play a relatively passive role as recipients of information. In view of recent evidence, demonstrating that infants use pointing to express interest and solicit information from adults, we set out to test whether giving the child the leading role in deciding what information to receive leads to better learning. Sixteen-month-olds were introduced to pairs of novel objects and, once they had pointed to an object, were shown a function for either the object they had chosen, or the object they had ignored. Ten minutes later, infants replicated the functions of chosen objects significantly more than those of un-chosen objects, despite having been equally visually attentive during demonstrations on both types of objects. These results show that offering information in response to infants' communicative gestures leads to superior learning (Experiment 1) and that this difference in performance is due to learning being facilitated when infants' pointing was responded to, not hindered when their pointing was ignored (Experiment 2), highlighting the importance of infants' own active engagement in acquiring information. Copyright: ß 2014 Begus et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The authors have no funding or support to report. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Infants start pointing systematically to objects or events around their first birthday. It has been proposed that infants point to an event to share their appreciation of it with others. In this study, we tested another hypothesis, according to which infants’ pointing could also serve as an epistemic request directed to the adult. Thus, infants’ motivation for pointing could include the expectation that adults would provide new information about the referent. In two experiments, an adult reacted to 12-month-olds’ pointing gestures by exhibiting “Informing” or “Sharing” behavior. In response, infants pointed more frequently across trials in the Informing than in the Sharing condition. This suggests that the feedback that contained new information matched infants’ expectations more than mere attention sharing. Such a result is consistent with the idea that not just the comprehension but also the production of early communicative signals is tuned to assist infants’ learning from others.
The view that questions are 'requests for missing information' is too simple when language use is considered. Formally, utterances are questions when they are syntactically marked as such, or by prosodic marking. Functionally, questions request that certain information is made available in the next conversational turn. But functional and formal questionhood are independent: what is formally a question can be functionally something else, for instance, a statement, a complaint or a request. Conversely, what is functionally a question is often expressed as a statement. Also, verbal signals such as eye-gaze, head-nods or even practical actions can serve information-seeking functions that are very similar to the function of linguistic questions. With original cross-cultural and multidisciplinary contributions from linguists, anthropologists, psychologists and conversation analysts, this book asks what questions do and how a question can shape the answer it evokes.
We review key aspects of young children's concept of knowledge. First, we discuss children's early insights into the way that information can be communicated from informant to recipient as well as their active search for information via questions. We then analyze the way that preschool children talk explicitly and cogently about knowledge and the presuppositions they make in doing so. We argue that all children, irrespective of culture and language, eventually arrive at the same fundamental conception of knowledge in the preschool years. Nevertheless, despite the universality of this basic conception, young children are likely to show considerable variation in their pattern of information seeking, depending on the conversational practices of their family and culture.
Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well-informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third-party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, children’s reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants—their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 69 is January 4, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Children acquire information, especially about the culture in which they are being raised, by listening to other people. Recent evidence has shown that young children are selective learners who preferentially accept information, especially from informants who are likely to be representative of the surrounding culture. However, the extent to which children understand this process of information transmission and actively exploit it to fill gaps in their knowledge has not been systematically investigated. We review evidence that toddlers exhibit various expressive behaviors when faced with knowledge gaps. They look toward an available adult, convey ignorance via nonverbal gestures (flips/shrugs), and increasingly produce verbal acknowledgments of ignorance ("I don't know"). They also produce comments and questions about what their interlocutors might know and adopt an interrogative stance toward them. Thus, in the second and third years, children actively seek information from interlocutors via nonverbal gestures or verbal questions and display a heightened tendency to encode and retain such sought-after information.
Questioning is a core component of formal pedagogy. Parents commonly question children, but do they use questions to teach? This article defines "pedagogical questions" as questions for which the questioner already knows the answer and intended to help the questionee learn. Transcripts of parent-child conversations were collected from the CHILDES database to examine the frequency and distribution of pedagogical questions. Analysis of 2,166 questions from 166 mother-child dyads and 64 father-child dyads (child's age between 2 and 6 years) showed that pedagogical questions are commonplace during day-to-day parent-child conversations and vary based on child's age, family environment, and historical era. The results serve as a first step toward understanding the role of parent-child questions in facilitating children's learning.
A crucial human cognitive goal is to understand and to be understood. But understanding often takes active management. Two studies investigated early developmental processes of understanding management by focusing on young children’s comprehension monitoring. We ask: When and how do young children actively monitor their comprehension of social-communicative interchanges and so seek to clarify and correct their own potential miscomprehension? Study 1 examined the parent-child conversations of 13 children studied longitudinally in everyday situations from the time the children were approximately 2 years through 3 ½ years. Study 2 used a semi-naturalistic situation in the laboratory to address these questions with more precision and control with 36 children aged 2 to 3 ½ years.
This study explored differences in caregiver-child interactions following children's information-seeking questions. Naturalistic speech from thirty-seven 4-year-olds and their caregivers was used to explore children's information-seeking questions, the caregiver's response, and children's subsequent follow-up. Half of the families were low-socioeconomic status (SES) and the other half were mid-SES. Although children across socioeconomic groups asked a similar proportion of questions, mid-SES caregivers offered significantly more explanatory responses to causal questions as well as more noncircular explanations than low-SES caregivers. No differences were found in children's follow-up to responses given to fact-based questions; however, after hearing unsatisfactory responses to causal questions, mid-SES children were significantly more likely to provide their own explanation. Such variability in caregiver-child interaction may have implications for subsequent learning.
Infants’ pointing gestures are a critical predictor of early vocabulary size. However, it remains unknown precisely how pointing relates to word learning. The current study addressed this question in a sample of 108 infants, testing one mechanism by which infants’ pointing may influence their learning. In Study 1, 18-month-olds, but not 12-month-olds, more readily mapped labels to objects if they had first pointed toward those objects than if they had referenced those objects via other communicative behaviors, such as reaching or gaze alternations. In Study 2, when an experimenter labeled a not pointed-to-object, 18-month-olds’ pointing was no longer related to enhanced fast mapping. These findings suggest that infants’ pointing gestures reflect a readiness and, potentially, a desire to learn.
Although the educational potential of student questions is widely acknowledged, primary school teachers need support to guide them to become effective for learning the curriculum. The aim of this review is to identify which teacher guidance supports effective student questioning. Thirty-six empirical studies on guiding student questioning in primary education were analysed. Four emergent themes for teacher guidance of effective student questioning were identified in the data: first, guiding effective student questioning requires confident teachers, who create a supportive classroom culture for question generation and acknowledge the potential in students’ initial questions; second, defining a conceptual focus supports teachers in aligning student questions to curricular goals; third, organising collective responsibility for the question process in the classroom fosters effective student questioning; and fourth, teacher guidance is supported when the process of questioning is visualised on a collective platform.
Explanations play an important role in learning and inference. People often learn by seeking explanations, and they assess the viability of hypotheses by considering how well they explain the data. An emerging body of work reveals that both children and adults have strong and systematic intuitions about what constitutes a good explanation, and that these explanatory preferences have a systematic impact on explanation-based processes. In particular, people favor explanations that are simple and broad, with the consequence that engaging in explanation can shape learning and inference by leading people to seek patterns and favor hypotheses that support broad and simple explanations. Given the prevalence of explanation in everyday cognition, understanding explanation is therefore crucial to understanding learning and inference.
Like scientists, children seek ways to explain causal systems in the world. But are children scientists in the strict Bayesian tradition of maximizing posterior probability? Or do they attend to other explanatory considerations, as laypeople and scientists—such as Einstein—do? Four experiments support the latter possibility. In particular, we demonstrate in four experiments that 4- to 8-year-old children, like adults, have a robust latent scope bias that leads to inferences that do not maximize posterior probability. When faced with two explanations equally consistent with observed data, where one explanation makes an unverified prediction, children consistently preferred the explanation that does not make this prediction (Experiment 1), even if the prior probabilities are identical (Experiment 3). Additional evidence suggests that this latent scope bias may result from the same explanatory strategies used by adults (Experiments 1 and 2), and can be attenuated by strong prior odds (Experiment 4). We argue that children, like adults, rely on ‘explanatory virtues’ in inference—a strategy that often leads to normative responses, but can also lead to systematic error.
Research with preschool children shows that explanations are important to them in that they actively seek explanations in their conversations with adults. But, what sorts of explanations do they prefer, and what, if anything, do young children learn from the explanations they receive? Following a preliminary study with adults (N = 67) to establish materials for use with children, we addressed this question using a semi-naturalistic methodology. 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 69) were dissatisfied when receiving non-explanations to their explanatory questions, but satisfied when receiving explanations, and their satisfaction varied appropriately across several levels of explanatory information. Moreover, using recall as a measure of learning, whereas children typically failed to recall non-explanations, their recall of explanatory information was consistently high and also varied appropriately across differing levels of information provided. These results confirm that children not only actively seek informative explanations in their everyday conversational interactions with adults, they selectively retain the answers they receive.
The study of children’s social learning is a topic of central importance to our understanding of human development. Learning from others allows children to acquire information efficiently; however, not all information conveyed by others is accurate or worth learning. A large body of research conducted over the past decade has shown that preschoolers learn selectively from some individuals over others. In the present article, we summarize our work and that of others on the developmental origins of selective social learning during infancy. The results of these studies indicate that infants are sensitive to a number of cues, including competence, age, and confidence, when deciding from whom to learn. We highlight the important implications of this research for our understanding of the cognitive and social skills necessary for selective learning and point out promising avenues for future research.
Parents' rhetorical questions to preschoolers are ubiquitous within collaborative problem-solving,