DQC Week 3 – Hirsh et al. and early learning

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this incredibly rich piece by Hirsh et al, who provides a concise evidence-based structure for how we evaluate an “educational” app. I was particularly curious regarding one of the final sections in which Hirsh et al discuss scaffolding exploration towards learning goals:

“Bonawitz and Schultz presented 4-year-olds with a toy that had four hidden functions. In one condition, children were told what the toy could do, shown one of its functions, and then left to explore the toy. In the other condition, an experimenter accidentally “tripped” on one of the functions (the same function demonstrated in the other condition) before the children were left to explore the toy. Children in the exploration condition were much more likely to discover all of the toy’s remaining functions, whereas those in the directed condition seemed restricted to the function that had been shown to them.”

I was initially sparked by how social interactions prior to their evaluation in this experiment may have shaped their responses to the activity, especially given the early learning mechanisms developed during infancy. The original article does address that it is entirely possible that “by the time children reach preschool, they have learned that pedagogical contexts apply beyond situations with ostensive cueing…By preschool, children seem actively to evaluate their teachers both for the knowledge they have and their ability to demonstrate it. Thus, well before children are immersed in formal education, they are sensitive to some conditions that promote effective instruction.”

I found this particularly interesting because I personally found that people often discount the capacity very young children have for processing complex information, especially in cultures who lack the educational foundation to understand childhood development, and that the platform on which they will learn formal education begins much earlier than the classroom.