Journal
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Volume 89, Issue 3, Pages 961-970Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12773
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Funding
- NSF [1223777]
- Division Of Research On Learning
- Direct For Education and Human Resources [1420548] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers' beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3- to 5-year-olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters' actions in learning than older children were (Experiment 1, N=53). Overall performance improved when the stories explicitly stated that characters were originally ignorant and clarified the characters' actions, but general developmental trends remained (Experiment 2, N=48). These data suggest that explicit metacognitive understanding of the relation between actions and learning is developing during the preschool years, which might have implications for how children learn from exploration.
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