The current study investigated the relation between the ways in which caregivers and children interact in a learning environment and children's learning outcomes and engagement with the learning task. We assessed caregiver-child interaction in a structured play environment in which 3- and 4-year-olds and a caregiver were tasked with learning a causal system. Children whose caregivers were more directive during their interaction learned the causal system the best and better than children whose caregivers were more hands off and allowed children to engage in unstructured exploration. These two groups of children explored for the same amount of time, indicating similar levels of engagement with the task. Children whose caregivers were more guiding, but not directive, played significantly longer than either of the other groups, suggesting deeper engagement. We discuss these findings in relation to how children engage in causal learning and how caregivers might contribute to children's learning and engagement with the learning process. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Children's creativity is often investigated through adults' subjective judging of novelty in a product, or by assessing the flexibility of children's thinking. These approaches do not explicitly ask children to reflect on what they think is creative and often ignore children's metacognitive understanding of creativity. We took two approaches to examining this development. First, using semi-structured interviews, we asked children, ages of 5-10 (N = 75), to define creativity and reflect theirs and others' creative actions (Study 1). As children got older, they reflected more on the novelty of the action and were more likely to describe creativity as a process that could be applied generally. Second, using more laboratory-based methods, we asked 5- to 10-year-olds (N = 137) and adults (N = 150) about the role that novelty (Study 2) and utility (Study 3) play in creative actions. In Study 2, children were more likely to judge that a novel action was more creative as they got older, and there was no difference between children and adults' responses by age 8. In Study 3, when two novel actions were contrasted, and one was more useful (but less novel), adults chose the useful action as more creative, whereas older children chose the more novel action. Overall, children's understanding of creativity as a general process undergoes significant change around mid-childhood, which has implications for its importance for informal learning environments.

Word learning is a social act. Because there is an arbitrary relation between words and their meaning, children must learn words from other people. Other people, however, are not always reliable sources of knowledge. People can be ignorant, hold false beliefs, or simply be deceptive. How do children evaluate the reliability of sources of knowledge for word learning? This chapter investigates the possibility that children possess multiple mechanisms for evaluating such reliability and possess such mechanisms very early in development. We suggest that infants not only track the accuracy of others using statistical learning mechanisms but also incorporate their existing knowledge of the world into judgments of reliability to make judicious inferences about the knowledge of a speaker and the pragmatics of a communicative act. Moreover, we suggest that as children get older, both low-level associative mechanisms and higher-level cognitive processes influence the way in which children track and use others’ reliability as sources of knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

We investigated how young children evaluate disagreements between two people and whether formal education affects this capacity. We compared 120 first graders tested during the 2014-2015 academic year, who received a direct instruction-based curriculum, with 112 first graders tested in the same school system during the 2016-2017 academic year, who received an inquiry-based curriculum. All children were given a belief reasoning task that tested their ability to evaluate disagreements about matters of fact, matters of interpretation, and matters of preference. Children's evaluations of disagreements about interpretations or preferences did not differ depending on curriculum. Children who received an inquiry-based curriculum were more likely to resolve disagreements concerning facts correctly than children who received a direct instruction-based curriculum. When asked to justify their responses to disagreements about facts, children who received the inquiry-based curriculum relied more on an examination of the state of the world. We suggest that an inquiry-based curriculum fosters a greater appreciation for how first-hand experiences can create knowledge.