The use of questions as problem-solving strategies during early childhood

Children adapt their questions to achieve efficient search

“…This suggests that the developmental factors that result in a greater proportion of constraint-seeking questions across age groups may not be the same as those that we successfully manipulated within age groups. In particular, the shift in constraint-seeking questions across age groups could reflect more general developmental changes, such as those in the ability to organize, cluster, and represent information at different hierarchical levels (Hollister Sandberg, Huttenlocher, & Newcombe, 1996), or in cognitive flexibility (Anderson, 2002;Legare et al, 2013). It could also relate to more general developmental changes in language and working memory.…”

“…For children, who are often surrounded by more knowledgeable peers and adults, asking questions is especially important for testing and extending their developing understanding of the world (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997;Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 1999;Gopnik & Wellman, 1994;Harris, 2012;Piaget, 1954; see also Graesser & McMahen, 1993;Graesser & Olde, 2003). We know that young children ask domain-appropriate questions (Callanan & Oakes, 1992;Greif, Kemler Nelson, Keil, & Guiterrez, 2006;Hickling & Wellman, 2001), have reasonable expectations about which responses count as answers to their questions (Frazier, Gelman, & Wellman, 2009), and can use the answers they receive to solve problems (Chouinard, 2007;Legare, Mills, Souza, Plummer, & Yasskin, 2013). We also know that children's questions are responsive to the statistics of their environment in that they preferentially question reliable informants (Mills, Legare, Bills, & Mejias, 2010;Mills, Legare, Grant, & Landrum, 2011) and target informative cues (see Nelson, Divjak, Gudmundsdottir, Martignon, & Meder, 2014).…”

Children’s Exploration of Physical Phenomena During Object Play

“…These researchers have found that when children encounter novel objects and phenomena in playful situations, they ask questions (e.g., Legare, Mills, Souza, Plummer, & Yasskin, 2013) and entertain various hypotheses about their use (e.g., Legare 2012Legare , 2014, formulate "experiments" and play more to disambiguate possible causes or effects (e.g., Cook, Goodman, & Schulz, 2011;Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007), and learn about the causal structure of objects through their own interventions (e.g., Sobel & Sommerville, 2010). For instance, in an experimental study, Legare (2012) found that when preschoolers encountered outcomes inconsistent with their prior experiences of whether or not particular blocks made a pair of boxes light up (in the classic "blicket detector" paradigm), their exploratory behaviors were related to the causal explanations they provided.…”

Causal learning in children

“…The tendency to seek and generate explanations is so pervasive and compelling that some psychologists have posited a ‘drive to explain’ . At very early ages, children generate appropriate domain‐specific explanations and use questions effectively to elicit explanations from others as a means of acquiring new knowledge . Given that young children generate and seek out explanations, how might explanations benefit causal learning?…”