Adults modify the way they speak to children to support children's learning across several domains. However, no previous research has studied whether adults change their language when explaining science to children. The current study examined if and how adults change the manner in which they talk about science when providing explanations to children vs. providing explanations to other adults. Participants (N = 81) were video recorded while explaining basic science concepts to children and adults. Recordings were later analyzed to determine if and how participants changed the quality and content of their explanations. The results confirmed that adults did change their explanations when talking to children about science by providing more potentially beneficial, but also disadvantageous, information. Participants perceived that they provided more accurate explanations to children, but appeared to be making metacognitive judgments largely based upon the changes made that could be beneficial to learning. Taken together, this work suggests that science may be a domain in which adults are not well equipped to modify and monitor their language to children.Developmental and educational psychologists have long been interested in how children's social environment influences cognitive development. A significant body of research has demonstrated that adults in children's environment, such as parents, teachers, and caregivers, play an instrumental role in guiding children's learning and thinking (e.g., Bronfenbrenner 1977;Bruner 1996;Vygotsky 1962Vygotsky , 1978. Sociocultural theories of development have proposed that one way adults promote children's learning is by changing the manner in which Metacognition Learning

Previous research suggests that young children often fail to preferentially learn task-relevant over task-irrelevant information, suggesting they may learn the same thing regardless of the task context. To investigate this hypothesis, two hundred and ninety-five children ranging from four- to eight-years old learned to predict patterns of features (e.g., eyes, noses) of novel faces in four task contexts. Results demonstrate that young children do in fact tailor what they are learning to specific task demands. When tasks required participants to learn a single predictive pattern, they learned that one pattern well but not other equally reliable patterns (e.g., pick mouths given eyes, but not noses given hats). However, when tasks allowed or required attention to multiple patterns, only older children showed evidence of learning any of the patterns. Thus, for young children, focusing on one thing compromises their ability to learn other things, but trying to learn too much at once may mean learning nothing. These results demonstrate tradeoffs between broad and narrow learning, that may be especially severe for younger children.

Existing research suggests that adults and older children experience a tradeoff where instruction and feedback help them solve a problem efficiently, but lead them to ignore currently irrelevant information that might be useful in the future. It is unclear whether young children experience the same tradeoff. Eighty-seven children (ages five- to eight-years) and 42 adults participated in supervised feature prediction tasks either with or without an instructional hint. Follow-up tasks assessed learning of feature correlations and feature frequencies. Younger children tended to learn frequencies of both relevant and irrelevant features without instruction, but not the diagnostic feature correlation needed for the prediction task. With instruction, younger children did learn the diagnostic feature correlation, but then failed to learn the frequencies of irrelevant features. Instruction helped older children learn the correlation without limiting attention to frequencies. Adults learned the diagnostic correlation even without instruction, but with instruction no longer learned about irrelevant frequencies. These results indicate that young children do show some costs of learning with instruction characteristic of older children and adults. However, they also receive some of the benefits. The current study illustrates just what those tradeoffs might be, and how they might change over development.