Children’s developing theory of mind and pedagogical evidence selection.

Abstract

Natural pedagogy emerges early in development, but good teaching requires tailoring evidence to learners’ knowledge. How does the ability to reason about others’ minds support early pedagogical evidence selection abilities? In 3 experiments (N = 205), we investigated preschool-aged children’s ability to consider others’ knowledge when selecting evidence in the service of teaching. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that 4-year-olds reliably selected evidence to rectify others’ false beliefs, and provided causal explanations in their teaching, whereas 3-year-olds did not. In Experiment 2, we tie children’s evidence selection abilities to theory of mind (ToM) development, above and beyond effects of age and numerical conservation abilities. In Experiment 3, we employed a 6-week training of children’s pedagogical evidence selection with a new teaching task, and further explored the relationship between these skills and children’s ToM abilities. We qualitatively replicated our results from Experiment 2 and report tentative evidence for a link between the pedagogical training and improvements in ToM. Together, our findings suggest important connections between reasoning about others’ minds and evidential reasoning in natural pedagogy during early childhood.

From Exploration to Instruction: Children Learn From Exploration and Tailor Their Demonstrations to Observers’ Goals and Competence

“…Our study provides a first step in studying what properties of the learner children take into account in adjusting their informative behaviors. Future work might examine not only how children select evidence as teachers (see also Bass et al., ; Rhodes et al., ) but also how they structure or sequentially order informative evidence to ensure accurate learning.…”

“…First, children between ages 3–5 show remarkable improvements on ToM tasks (e.g., false belief tasks; Wellman et al., ), which require a basic understanding of others’ observations and beliefs. Notably, a recent study suggests a relationship between children's ToM performance and pedagogical selection of evidence (Bass et al., ). Second, children are sensitive to the quality of information provided by others, preferentially learning from accurate informants (e.g., Sabbagh & Baldwin, ; Koenig & Harris, ; Birch, Vauthier, & Bloom, ) and informants who provide more informative evidence (Gweon, Pelton, Konopka, & Schulz, ; Gweon & Asaba, 2017; see Heyman & Legare, ; Sobel & Kushnir, for reviews).…”

Young children consider the expected utility of others’ learning to decide what to teach

“…In our task, because children were presented with a generic learner whose specific preferences and competencies were unknown, children might have reasonably assumed that what was rewarding or costly for them in the past would also be rewarding or costly for the learner. Making teaching decisions for others who have quite di erent utility functions than they do (e.g., di erent preferences or competencies 36,31,53 ) may be more challenging and improve in tandem with children's Theory of Mind and executive control 28,54,25 .…”

“…Second, by the beginning of formal schooling, children already have an abstract understanding of what constitutes informative teaching (i.e., the information communicated should be accurate, su cient, yet not superfluous), and readily evaluate others' teaching accordingly 19,20,21,22,23 . As teachers themselves, children can also tailor the content of their communication based on the learner's goal or knowledge state 24,25,26 , readily selecting appropriate evidence to communicate a concept 27 , correct others' false beliefs 28 , or disambiguate a causal system 29,22 . In particular, when evidence is physically costly to generate (e.g., demonstration requires multiple actions or walking over a distance), 5-to 6-year-olds resist providing unnecessary information 29,22 , suggesting that children are sensitive not only to the value of information but also the cost of generating it.…”

“…We then ask whether the ability to consider the expected costs and rewards of learning (from exploration and from instruction) is present even early in childhood by comparing children's decisions to the model predictions. We chose 5 to 7 years as our target age range, because children this age consider others' mental states to decide what to communicate as teachers 29,22,28 and can infer and integrate expected costs and rewards when reasoning about others' goal-directed actions 8 .…”