That is Tamar Kushnir’s passion. She has been awarded two new grants that will build our understanding of the mechanisms of learning in young children with important implications for the study of cognitive development as well as for early childhood education and parenting.
Young Children’s Understanding of Free Will
When do children learn how not to do something they want to do? Every parent wants to know! The answer has important implications for parenting and early childhood education. Free will, the notion that someone who has performed an action could have done otherwise, plays a central role in adults’ explanations of behavior and is critical to our ability to reason about moral obligation and social responsibility. Yet, very little research has examined the development of the concept in children.
Tamar Kushnir, Assistant Professor of Human Development and her colleagues, Henry Wellman, University of Michigan and Alison Gopnik, University of California at Berkeley, propose to do just that. In a new grant from the Causal Learning Collaborative through the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the team will study preschoolers’ reasoning about their choices and actions.
Research on children’s learning shows that by the time children are 4 or 5 years old, they can reason about the psychological causes of human actions, including goals, beliefs, desires, and intentions. They can make distinctions between actions caused by psychological states such as desires and those caused by physical forces or biological processes. Preschoolers are also able to reason about things that might have happened. Thus, it is plausible that preschoolers may have some concept of freedom of choice.
Preliminary work by Kushnir, graduate student Nadia Chernyak, and her colleagues has shown that 4-year-olds can already reason about freedom of choice in some circumstances, but important developmental differences exist between 4- and 6-year olds. In particular, 4-year-olds appreciate that in some situations they would have been able to freely choose a course of action, while in other situations their actions are constrained. However, 4-year-olds cannot reason about the freedom to inhibit or not do a desired action, whereas 6-year-olds can.
The researchers have designed two studies to look more deeply at young children’s understanding of free will. In one, the researchers will examine preschoolers’ understanding of free versus constrained actions in more depth, hoping to establish an early link between action understanding, social cognition, and moral reasoning. In the second study, the researchers will look more closely at developmental differences in children’s reasoning about not doing an action and their own inhibitory control.
Who Knows Best? How Children Evaluate Who to Learn From
In another grant, from the Institute for the Social Sciences, Kushnir will conduct preliminary studies on how 3- and 4-year-old children evaluate evidence from experts in light of their own experiences through play.
Increasingly very young children are being exposed to formal instruction, either at home or in academically-oriented preschool programs. More research is needed to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this trend in early childhood education. The notion that dominates theories of young children’s learning – that they learn best through play and active exploratory experiences – suggests that that instruction may not benefit this age group. On the other hand, research on developing social cognition has shown that even preschoolers understand that some people know more than others, and this understanding guides who they choose to learn from.
These experiments involve causal learning, both because causal knowledge has been shown to be central to young children’s early concepts and because new research shows that play is critical to causal learning. One study looks at whether 3- and 4-year olds take into account another person’s level of expertise when there is ambiguous or conflicting evidence from the their own play. Another study looks at whether preschoolers know that some types of causal learning benefit from instruction whereas others may benefit more from their own play.
Findings from these studies will build on a growing body of research on the mechanisms of learning in young children with important implications for the study of cognitive development as well as for early childhood education.
“We hope studies such as these will shed light on the process by which children learn – and specifically how social cognition and social context influence early learning," said Kushhir. "Maybe more importantly, though, we hope this research will inspire people to talk to children, answer their questions, and also to listen to them and ask them questions."
She ended with a challenge, do your own 'experiments;' find out what the young minds around us are capable of. I promise they will amaze you.”