Children's Developing Ideas About Knowledge and Its Acquisition

Ronfard, Samuel; Bartz, Deborah T.; Cheng, Liying; Chen, Xinkui; Harris, Paul L.

doi:10.1016/bs.acdb.2017.10.005

Cited by 16 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…For these reasons, it is exceedingly important for learners to assess if (or when) others are providing credible information. Fortunately, there are several cues people use to decide whether someone is providing credible information, such as a person's professed level of knowledge or ignorance [e.g., 2,3], area of expertise [e.g., 4], prior track-record of accuracy [e.g., 5,6], perceptual access to information [e.g., 7], or a person's status or prestige [8; for reviews see 1, [9][10][11][12][13][14]. Another useful credibility cue (the focus of this manuscript) is a person's expression of confidence or uncertainty.…”

Section: Confidence Is Good But Overconfidence Always Sinks the Shipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility

Birch¹,

Severson²,

Baimel³

2020

PLoS ONE

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The most readily-observable and influential cue to one's credibility is their confidence. Although one's confidence correlates with knowledge, one should not always trust confident sources or disregard hesitant ones. Three experiments (N = 662; 3-to 12-year-olds) examined the developmental trajectory of children's understanding of 'calibration': whether a person's confidence or hesitancy correlates with their knowledge. Experiments 1 and 2 provide evidence that children use a person's history of calibration to guide their learning. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed a developmental progression in calibration understanding: Children preferred a well-calibrated over a miscalibrated confident person by around 4 years, whereas even 7-to 8-year-olds were insensitive to calibration in hesitant people. The widespread implications for social learning, impression formation, and social cognition are discussed.

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Section: Confidence Is Good But Overconfidence Always Sinks the Shipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility

Birch¹,

Severson²,

Baimel³

2020

PLoS ONE

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“…With young children, uncertainty monitoring could help children recognize when they do or do not know the correct label for an object or meaning of a word they hear in their environment. Children's understanding of their own knowledge and ignorance helps guide them on when to seek information from an adult or more knowledgeable peer (Ronfard et al, 2017). The significant relation between growth in vocabulary and their uncertainty monitoring in the current study supports this notion and indicates that relations between children's metacognitive skills and self‐regulated learning can be extended even into the early childhood period of development.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Metacognitive development has long been held as a driving force behind improvements in children's social and cognitive skills and is seen as foundational for academic achievement (Flavell, 1979;Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996). An important aspect of children's metacognitive development is the ability to accurately monitor ongoing subjective feelings of uncertainty (i.e., engage in uncertainty monitoring), which may underlie children's curiosity about the world (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2008;Ronfard et al, 2017) and information-seeking behaviors (Selmeczy et al, 2021). Uncertainty monitoring is readily evident by middle childhood (Dunlosky & Rawson, 2012;Fandakova et al, 2017;Lockl & Schneider, 2007;Roebers et al, 2007), but research on the development of this ability in early childhood is much scarcer.…”

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confidence: 99%

The development of uncertainty monitoring during kindergarten: Change and longitudinal relations with executive function and vocabulary in children from low‐income backgrounds

et al. 2021

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Children's ability to monitor subjective feelings of uncertainty (i.e., engage in uncertainty monitoring) is a central metacognitive skill. In the current study, we examined the development of uncertainty monitoring as well as its relations with vocabulary and executive function development in children (N = 137, 52% female) from predominately White and Latinx/Hispanic backgrounds when they were 4-6 years old and enrolled in a Head Start preschool and kindergarten between 2018 and 2019. We found that children's uncertainty monitoring improved during the kindergarten year. Children's executive function and vocabulary in preschool and vocabulary growth from preschool to kindergarten predicted uncertainty monitoring at the end of kindergarten, which sheds new light on potential mechanisms supporting children's metacognitive development.

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“…In other words, young children can intentionally seek information through gesturing, and they more readily and effectively process and memorize the solicited information than information they passively receive. Young children produce gestures, especially pointing gestures, not only to share interests and attention but also to proactively elicit information from interlocutors (Begus & Southgate, 2012;Kovács et al, 2014; for reviews, see Harris, 2019, andRonfard et al, 2018). For example, Begus and Southgate (2012) found that 12-month-olds were more likely to point to objects when interacting with a knowledgeable interlocutor than with a poorly informed interlocutor who had incorrectly named familiar objects before, suggesting they were pointing to seek information from the knowledgeable informant.…”

Section: Gesture Helps Children Solicit Information That They Prioritizementioning

confidence: 99%

Early gesture predicts later language development.

Rowe¹,

Wei²,

Salo³

2022

Gesture in Language: Development Across the Lifespan.

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Young children communicate via gesture before they communicate through speech; research has documented strong associations between early gesture use and later language development (e.g., Iverson et al., 2008;Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009a). The goal of this chapter is to summarize the literature on relations between early gesture production and comprehension and language development in typically developing children with a focus on describing the nature of these relations and considering the mechanisms involved. In the first half of this chapter, we review relations between gesture and language skills at different points across early development. In the second half, we offer some potential non-mutually exclusive reasons, and corresponding evidence, for why early gesture might predict later language skills. We see gesture, in addition to being an important means of communication, as a useful indicator of concurrent social-cognitive abilities, a key predictor of later skills, and a potential area for early-intervention research.In this chapter, we define gestures as nonverbal communicative actions that are symbolic, or representational, in nature (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005), and we use the term language to refer to children's oral language skills, including their vocabulary knowledge and ability to produce multiword utterances (spoken or signed). Early in development, most gestures tend to be deictic, such as pointing and showing, and conventional (e.g., waving, nodding or shaking the head [Bates et al., 1975], giving a thumbs-up [Bates et al., 1975]). Later in toddlerhood, however, children also produce representational or iconic gestures (e.g., holding arms out wide to indicate "big"; Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988;Özçalışkan et al., 2014). Actions that are noncommunicative are not considered gestures. For instance, many actions performed on objects (e.g., grabbing a block, turning pages) are not gestures, because they do not request a response from the interlocutor and hence are not communicative. However, holding up an object for the interlocutor to see is a deictic gesture because it serves the same deictic function (i.e., showing) as many pointing gestures. Because pointing is the most common gesture used by young children, our review highlights the role of pointing in language development while also examining other early gestures.

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Children's Developing Ideas About Knowledge and Its Acquisition

Cited by 16 publications

References 56 publications

Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility

Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility

The development of uncertainty monitoring during kindergarten: Change and longitudinal relations with executive function and vocabulary in children from low‐income backgrounds

Early gesture predicts later language development.

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