Information seeking strategies in cognitive development

Abstract

The information seeking strategies of six-, seven-, and eight-year Bruner (1966) argued that the thinking of young children is largely dependent upon perceptible aspects of the environment. Thus, when a child seeks relevancy or information we might expect his search to be guided by those features which can be "seen" in the situation rather than those which must be abstracted from it. Mosher & Hornsby (1966) investigated this possibility using the old parlor game of 20 Questions. They found that when faced with a fIXed set of alternative solutions to a problem six-year-olds used a strategy in which each alternative was tested individually until the correct one was found. Among the eight-and eleven-year-olds the characteristic strategy consisted of establishing constraints upon the set of alternatives until only the correct one remained tenable. In this situation the appropriate constraints were not perceptually obvious and the youngest children were unable to use them. In a similar situation they found that children did, however, recognize the value of constraint questions before they were able to generate such questions on their own.The present study was designed to investigate the information seeking strategies of children in a situation where the appropriate constraints either were or were not "suggested by" the nature of the situation. The major hypothesis is that young children are unable to impose order on a perceptually disordered environment. Thus, it was predicted that the ability to establish informational constraints would increase not only with age, but also with the degree to which those constraints could be "seen" in the situation. In addition, the effect of varying the amount of cognitive strain imposed by the task was examined. Finally, some evidence was gathered concerning the child's ability to recognize questions representative of efficient information seeking strategies.

Structure of the environment and the growth of strategies for acquiring information

“…The only respect in which the present study differed importantly from Van Horn and Bartz (1968) was that in the present study each 2 was given all four arrays, whereas in the previous study one group of ^s was given the ordered array and another group was given the random array.…”

“…In a situation similar to that used by Mosher and Hornsby (I966), Van Horn and Bartz (1968) found that six-year-olds would use the under lying features of a task to establish informational constraints only when those features were perceptually obvious. Eight-year-olds, on the other hand, took advantage of these underlying features regardless of whether or not they could be "seen" in the situation.…”

“…Taking into account the theories and previous studies (especially Van Horn and Bartz, 1968) relevant to the present experiment, the very least one would expect to find would be a difference between Array OR and Array 4R among the kindergarteners.…”

“…I was an attempt to elaborate on previous results (Van Horn and Bartz, 1968) which showed that children's strategies for acquiring information depended upon whether the problem array was completely ordered or completely random. Exp.…”

“…II was to re-examine the differential effects of completely ordered and completely random arrays on children's strategies which was reported by Van Horn and Bartz (1968), as well as to assess carry-over effects between arrays. In order to accomplish this objective, 40 children were randomly divided into two groups, each of which contained 10 kindergarteners and 10 first graders, ^s in Group A were given two 20Q, problems using Array OR followed by two problems using Array 4R.…”