How do we know what/when young kids are ready to learn?

The Washington Post:

How do we really know when young children are ready to learn specific material? Here to explain is cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham,  professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” His latest book is “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education.” This appeared on his Science and Education blog.

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In truth, it’s a bad question because the answer depends on the type of abstraction. If the subtext of the question is “what’s the earliest age at which children show understanding of an abstraction?” the best choice from those offered above is “2 years.” And very likely earlier. Here’s one example.

Caren Walker and Alison Gopnik (2013) examined toddlers ability to understand a higher order relation, namely, causality triggered by the concept “same.”

The experimental paradigm worked like this. The toddler was shown a white box and told “some things make my toy play music and some things do not make my toy play music.” The child then observed three pairs of blocks that made the box play music, as shown below. On the fourth trial, the experimenter put one block on the box and asked the child to select another that would make the toy play music. There were three choices: a block that looked the same as the one already on the toy, a block that had previously been part of a pair that made the toy play music, and a completely novel block.

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The same applies to the concept explored by Walker & Gopnik. Dedre Gentner (Christie & Gentner, 2010) has reported data showing that even preschoolers seem to have trouble with reasoning tasks that call for higher-order relations—they seem to need scaffolding in which the important relation is labelled. Walker and Gopnik point out that Gentner used a task requiring verbal labeling, whereas their task merely called for an action. Seemingly small differences in what look like conceptually similar tasks can make a big difference in whether the child seems to understand.

Read the whole story: The Washington Post