How much can you learn in one year? How content, pedagogical resources, and learner’s age influence beliefs about knowledge acquisition

Lockhart, Kristi L.; Goddu, Mariel K.; Keil, Frank C.

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2021.101115

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…This integration and simulation process could place a high demand on children's developing cognitive capacities, in turn limiting their ability to accurately predict the shape of their learning curve. Moreover, children are more optimistic than adults (Schneider, 1998;Lockhart et al, 2021), and thus may be biased to predict near-ceiling performance from the start. As predictions about future learning may influence actual learning, it is important for future research to explore when children have the cognitive capacity to accurately predict their future learning curves.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

People Accurately Predict the Shape of Skill Learning Curves

Zhang,

McDougle,

Leonard

2024

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Decades of research have shown that skill learning usually unfolds exponentially — people improve rapidly early on, and then performance levels off. Given how important expectations of learning are for actual learning, we explored whether people accurately intuit this canonical progression in skill learning. Across five pre-registered experiments (n = 375), we find that people correctly predict that skill learning on a novel visuomotor task follows an exponential decay function, both for a naïve player and themselves, before even engaging with the task. Importantly, people are sensitive to conditions that merit exponential learning and rationally only predict exponential learning curves when a player puts in effort and the task is not too difficult. Although people accurately represent the overall shape of their learning in our task, we find that they misestimate specific parameters, which may have negative downstream effects on learning outcomes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

People Accurately Predict the Shape of Skill Learning Curves

Zhang,

McDougle,

Leonard

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…This age-related pattern aligns with other improvements in children's ability to identify nuances in knowledge (e.g., Landrum & Mills, 2015) and with general cognitive development related to children's own understanding of knowledge acquisition (e.g., Sobel & Letourneau, 2015). For example, 5-to 7-year-olds' judgments of how much information can be learned do not differ based on the pedagogical strategies available to a learner (e.g., an expert source, one's own access to relevant learning materials, or trial and error) whereas 8-to 11-year-olds expect a learner to acquire more knowledge when they learn from an expert, regardless of the domain of information (Lockhart et al, 2021). Children's metacognitive awareness of learning processes during this transition to middle childhood (e.g., Simons et al, 2020) may promote positive views of knowledge.…”

Section: Children's Understanding Of Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The current research focused on the transition from early to middle childhood due to agerelated increases in children's understanding of knowledge (e.g., Lockhart et al, 2021;Sobel & Letourneau, 2015) and coordination of information to evaluate moral issues during this time (e.g., social relationships, type of harm, Arsenio, 1988;Wainryb & Turiel, 1993; see Appendix C for information about a companion study that was not completed due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Young children readily recognize blatant physical harm as a moral issue, but between 3 and 10 years of age, deepen their understanding of more complex issues such as unfair resource distribution and violations of civil liberties (e.g., Elenbaas, 2019;Helwig & Jasiobedkza, 2001;Smetana et al, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%