Are child-directed interactions the cradle of social learning?

Abstract

Theorists have proposed that child-directed, ostensive interactions provide a critical point of entry for supporting children's learning from others, either because they render the intentions of a teacher easier to understand (e.g., Barresi & Moore, 1996; Moore, 2010; Tomasello, 1999) or because they mark information as culturally important and generalizable (e.g., Csibra & Gergely, 2009). This article evaluates these proposals in light of data from U.S. and European children, as well as from communities where directed interactions with young children are rare. The evidence reviewed from both bodies of work leave reason to doubt the claim that directed interactions provide automatic and innate informational value for learners. Instead, the value of child-directed teaching contexts likely stems from 2 factors: how these interactions focus children's attention in the moment, and how children learn to reason pragmatically regarding the value child-directed contexts have.

Reexamining the Verbal Environments of Children From Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds

“…They suggested a resolution to this puzzle by reference to studies of societies in which children are socialized to attend intently to what is going on around them; such children may “be attuned to attend to others’ language and interactions, and be able to profit from overheard speech in ways unlike those of infants in societies where child‐centered face‐to‐face interactions are the norm” (p. 201). Shneidman and Woodward () made a similar argument: “Rather than signaling that child‐directed interactions have universal, a priori information value, the empirical record suggests that children learn to see directed interactions as informative in some contexts based on their social experiences” (p. 13). The underlying principle in both arguments is that normative variation (in this case, child‐directed vs. overheard speech) in the verbal environments of young children from different social and cultural addresses will likely instill different preferred normative strategies for attending to and learning from speech, which will in turn afford different benefits.…”

Learning From Others and Spontaneous Exploration: A Cross‐Cultural Investigation

“…Pedagogical framing could inform children's reasoning about socially communicated information in several ways. Children could infer that information presented in pedagogical contexts is usually about what is true about the world (e.g., “This is what the toy does”; see Bonawitz et al., ; Grice, ; Gweon et al., ; Shafto et al., ), or about how to interact with the world (e.g., “This is how you play with the toy”; see Butler & Markman, ; Casler & Kelemen, ; Nielsen, ; Nielsen & Tomaselli, ; Over & Carpenter, ; Shneidman & Woodward, ; Shneidman et al., ; Vredenburgh, Kushnir, & Casasola, ). Indeed, any demonstration likely serves as a “repository of cultural knowledge” (Harris, , p. 60) and abundant research has shown that children are sensitive to information about social norms and conventions.…”

“…Indeed, there might be important and interesting developmental or cultural differences in the kinds of hypotheses children entertain from such demonstrations. In light of prior work documenting developmental shifts in children's reasoning in pedagogical contexts (e.g., Butler & Markman, ; Nielsen, ; Shneidman, Todd, & Woodward, ; see Shneidman & Woodward, ), we look forward to future research that might provide additional insight into the precise nature of children's inferences across early childhood. Critically, however, regardless of the specific content of the inferences, the current results suggest that pedagogical instruction leads children to learn not only that the communicated information is important, but also (by implication) that information that is not communicated is not true, relevant, or valuable.…”

Sexual harassment reported by undergraduate female physicists

“…Research across different scientific disciplines is beginning to demonstrate that sexual harassment not only occurs in their fields, but contributes to their educational and professional environments [5,6], further supporting the idea that sexual harassment carries significant career consequences for victims [7]. The field of physics is particularly male dominated, even when compared to other science, engineering, technology, and mathematics (STEM) fields, such as chemistry and biological sciences [8]. Given that a high level of male representation is a known antecedent of sexual harassment in the workplace, how does sexual harassment impact members in a field such as physics?…”