HOW CHILDREN LEARN

HOW CHILDREN LEARN

Children differ from adult learners in many ways, but there are also surprising commonalities across learners of all ages.  In this chapter we provide some insights into children as learners.  A study of young children fulfills two purposes:  it illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the learners who populate the nation’s schools, and it offers a window into the development of learning that cannot be seen if one considers only well-established learning patterns and expertise.  In studying the development of children, an observer gets a dynamic picture of learning unfolding over time.

A fresh understanding of infant cognition and of how young children from 2 to 5 years old build on that early start also sheds new light on how to ease their transition into formal school settings.

INFANTS’ CAPABILITIES

Theories

It was once commonly thought that infants lack the ability to form complex ideas.  For much of this century, most psychologists accepted the traditional thesis that a newborn’s mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa) on which the record of experience is gradually impressed.  It was further thought that language is an obvious prerequisite for abstract thought and that, in its absence, a baby could not have knowledge.  Since babies are born with a limited repertoire of behaviors and spend most of their early months asleep, they certainly appear passive and unknowing.  Until recently, there was no obvious way for them to demonstrate otherwise.

But challenges to this view arose.  It became clear that with carefully designed methods, one could find ways to pose rather complex questions about what infants and young children know and can do.  Armed with new methodologies, psychologists began to accumulate a substantial body of data about the remarkable abilities that young children possess that stands in stark contrast to the older emphases on what they lacked.  It is now known that very young children are competent, active agents of their own conceptual development.  In short, the mind of the young child has come to life (Bruner, 1972, 1981a, b; Carey and Gelman, 1991; Gardner, 1991; Gelman and Brown, 1986; Wellman and Gelman, 1992).

A major move away from the tabula rasa view of the infant mind was taken by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.  Beginning in the 1920s, Piaget argued that the young human mind can best be described in terms of complex cognitive structures.  From close observations of infants and careful questioning of children, he concluded that cognitive development proceeds through

certain stages, each involving radically different cognitive schemes.

While Piaget observed that infants actually seek environmental stimulation that promotes their intellectual development, he thought that their initial representations of objects, space, time, causality, and self are constructed only gradually during the first 2 years.  He concluded that the world of young infants is an egocentric fusion of the internal and external worlds and that the development of an accurate representation of physical reality depends on the gradual coordination of schemes of looking, listening, and touching.

After Piaget, others studied how newborns begin to integrate sight and sound and explore their perceptual worlds.  For perceptual learning theorists, learning was considered to proceed rapidly due to the initial availability of exploration patterns that infants use to obtain information about the objects and events of their perceptual worlds (Gibson, 1969).  As information processing theories began to emerge, the metaphor of mind as computer, information processor, and problem solver came into wide usage (Newell et al., 1958) and was quickly applied to the study of cognitive development.

Although these theories differed in important ways, they shared an emphasis on considering children as active learners who are able to set goals, plan, and revise. Children are seen as learners who assemble and organize material.

 As such, cognitive development involves the acquisition of organized knowledge structures including, for example, biological concepts, early number sense, and early understanding of basic physics.  In addition, cognitive development involves the gradual acquisition of strategies for remembering, understanding, and solving problems.

The active role of learners was also emphasized by Vygotsky (1978), who pointed to other supports for learning.  Vygotsky was deeply interested in the role of the social environment, included tools and cultural objects, as well as people, as agents in developing thinking.  Perhaps the most powerful idea from Vygotsky to influence developmental psychology was that of a zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), described below.  It refers to a bandwidth of competence (Brown and Reeve, 1987) that learners can navigate with aid from a supportive context, including the assistance of others.  (For modern treatments of this concept, see Newman et al., 1989;

 Zone of Proximal Development

The zone of proximal development is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky, 1978:86).  What children can do with the assistance of others is even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone (Vygotsky, 1978:85).

The zone of proximal development embodies a concept of readiness to learn that emphasizes upper levels of competence.  These upper boundaries are not immutable, however, but constantly changing with the learner’s increasing independent competence.

What a child can perform today with assistance she will be able to perform tomorrow independently, thus preparing her for entry into a new and more demanding collaboration.  These functions could be called the “buds,” rather than the fruits of development.  The actual developmental level characterizes mental development retrospectively, while the zone of proximal development characterizes mental development prospectively (Vygotsky, 1978:8687).