Behavioral and Social Science 50 Years of Discovery (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Changing Views of Cognitive Competence in the Young
Changing Views of Cognitive Competence in the Young
Pages 173-207
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Discovering the Mind at Work /
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It became clear that with carefully Partial support for the preparation of this chapter came from fellowships to the authors while at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. While there both authors received funds from the Spencer Foundation, and Rochel Gelman was also supported by the Alfred P
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Piaget did not think that human infants are born with innate cognitive structures, but rather that structures develop due to the child's ever-present tendency to engage the environment actively, interpreting it in accordance with progressively changing cognitive "schemes." 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, so that sometimes young children even form practical convictions contrary to those held by older children and adults. While Piaget observed that infants actually seek environmental stimulation that promotes their intellectual development, he thought that their initial representations of objects, space, time, cause, and self are constructed only gradually during the first two years.
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Those working in the informationprocessing tradition focused both on the possibility that early failures in completing Piagetian tasks are due in part to limits on processing capacity and the conditions under which children actively employ strategies for problem solving and knowledge acquisition. All these theoretical developments challenged the empiricist account and influenced the direction of research in developmental psychology.
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The infants quickly learned to suck at a given rate to bring the movie into focus, showing not only that they were capable of and interested in learning how to control their own sensory environment but also that they preferred a clear image to a blurry one. A second method demonstrates and depends on an infant's thirst for novelty.
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reported similar findings with objects that were smooth or had tiny notes on their surface. These findings establish two important points about the cognitive structure that infants employ to interpret sensory input from objects: (a)
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These results suggest the babies expect solid objects to persist even when no longer in sight. In short, considerable research with young infants has shown that they treat objects and events as sources for multiple kinds of sensory input, and
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Preverbal human infants also recognize properties common to sets of nonidentical objects.
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PRESCHOOL THOUGHT Principles About Numbers, Causes, and Objects Preschool thought and its development are much influenced by implicit knowledge of fundamental principles governing the determination and manipulation of numbers, the character of physical causality, and the differences between animate and inanimate objects. Number Many preschoolers spontaneously count collections soon after they learn to talk.
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To account for such inventions, it is necessary to postulate the use of something like an implicit principle of commutativity. Finally, the preschool child also understands that addition and subtraction, unlike displacement, rearrangement, or item substitution, alter numerosity.
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Objects An early concern for mechanism may explain why preschool children are able to separate animate and inanimate objects (Carey, 1985a; Gelman et al., 1983; Keil, 1979~. For example, three- to five-year-olds, asked whether a rock, a doll, and a person could walk, typically answered that a rock cannot walk because it has no feet; that a doll cannot walk unless someone pushes it, because its feet are only pretend; and that people can walk by themselves.
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From page 185... ...
For example, there is compelling evidence that preschoolers' interest in and recall of stories reflects the availability of story grammars (Mandler, 1983; Stein and Trabasso, 19821; that preschoolers can systematically classify (Rosch et al., 19761; that they can be logical (Braine and Rumain, 19831; that they represent knowledge with a variety of coherent structures (Keil, 1981; Markman, 1981; Nelson and Gruendel, 1981~; that children this age can take account of the perspective of an observer other than themselves (tempers et al., 1977; Shatz, 1978~; and even that congenitally blind children have Euclidean representations of space (Landau et al., 19811. Given all this evidence, it should not be surprising to discover that preschool children are often strategic and planful when acquiring knowledge structures.
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A central theme was that preschool children would differ from grade-school children on tasks that demand a great deal of strategic ingenuity. Young children, failing to devise strategic plans, would be at a considerable disadvantage on tests of deliberate memory, whereas older children would display increasing competence, primarily because they deploy more and more effective learning strategies.
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Some have argued that much, if not most, cognitive growth is a result of children internalizing cognitive activities that they originally witness in others (Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1983; Rogoff and Wertsch, 1984~. Interesting and important though guided learning situations may be, it is clear that much of the time children are also actively involved in orchestrating their own learning.
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These were no ordinary blocks, however. Standard blocks had their weight evenly distributed, and could therefore be balanced at the geometric center.
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For a time, however, length and weight were considered independently; standard blocks were balanced by the geometric center rule and conspicuously weighted blocks by the rule of "estimate weight first and then compensate." Hidden weight problems still generated errors; these blocks looked identical to the standard ones and were therefore subjected to the geometric center rule; when they did not conform, they were discarded as anomalies, "impossible to balance." Now the young theorists were made uncomfortable by the remaining exceptions and began to seek a rule for them. In so doing, a reorganization was induced that resulted in a single rule for all blocks.
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. For example, if preschool children are taught that a person has a stomach, they allow that other animals do as well, but inanimate objects do not.
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Yet, these early theories can be two-edged swords; they may sometimes impede children's understanding of explicit theories encountered in the context of formal schooling. Knowing this, we
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Three-year-olds keeping alive their memory of a hidden toy seem to grasp the rudiments of rehearsal, but this does not mean that they know how to rehearse in a manner that would assist them in learning to spell, or remember historical facts or complex logical or mathematical relations. Gradual refinement and tuning of skills, together with a growing understanding of their function and range of utility, typifies the evolution of many school-relevant learning strategies.
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It should not be surprising that many children's natural learning proclivities are overwhelmed by the task of acquiring large amounts of decontextualized material, organized in nonpreferred modes, with demands for precision and processing capacity greater than is the case in everyday life (Bartlett, 1958~. School learners not only must acquire knowledge in specific domains, such as science and history, but they must also "learn how to learn," developing routines for studying in general.
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In these systems of tutelage, learning proceeds at the child's own pace; participation is expected only at a level the child can handle, or a little beyond, thereby presenting a comfortable challenge. The main features of natural learning situations are thus quite different from formal schooling.
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In contrast, mastery-oriented children treat obstacles as challenges to be overcome by perfecting one's learning strategies; they do not attribute a temporary setback to personal shortcomings. Their verbalizations following failure often consist of positive self-instruction: "Slow down," "try new tactics," "evaluate the task more systematically." Dweck and Bempechat (1983)
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But this criticism must be constructive, mastery-oriented selfguidance rather than self-derogation. To end on a optimistic note we will illustrate two methods that have achieved some success at acclimatizing children to formal learning settings: (a)
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Another successful intervention ploy is to lessen the gap between informal and formal learning settings. As we have seen, natural tutoring involves modeling on the part of the teacher and a gradual transfer of responsibility to the novices when and if they are ready to take control of their own learning.
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The teacher then fades into the background as the students take charge of their own learning from texts. The results of the reciprocal teaching intervention with junior high schoolers were dramatic.
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, whereby students come to understand, challenge, and flexibly apply their knowledge, depend on maintaining the active thirst for knowledge that the preschool child brings initially into settings of formal education. The more we learn about the knowledge structures that children bring to school and the instructional practices that foster their natural proclivities to build and refine theories, the more able we will be to design instructional modes that promote adaptive expertise rather than the acquisition of inert knowledge.
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In an increasingly complex and rapidly changing technological society, more than ever before, students must be equipped to acquire new information, critically evaluate it, and adapt to its implications. They must learn to waive their imprecise theories in favor of the precise, explicit, more encompassing theories that constitute formal knowledge.
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In H.W. Reese, ea., Advances in Child Development and Behavior.
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Child Development 56:125-137. DeLoache, J.S., Sugarman, S., and Brown, A.L.
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Child Development 50:295-298. Flavell, J.H.
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1979 What, when and how about why: a longitudinal study of early expressions of causality. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 44 (Serial No.
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1976 The relation between audition and vision in the human newborn infant. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 41 (4, Serial No.
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1982 Rules of causal attribution. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 47 (1, Serial No.
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1975 The Infant's Response to Entrapment Between Contradictory Messages in Face to Face Interaction. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver.
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