Digital traces have been used to measure self-regulated learning (SRL), yet the validity of inferences made about these traces has often been questioned. Recently, researchers have used multiple channels of data — including digital traces, verbalizations, and self-reports — to validate inferences about individual SRL events. Research on the validation of inferences about sequences of multiple SRL events remains limited; however, investigating these sequences has the potential to refine SRL theories. To study the validation of sequences of SRL events, we collected multimodal data from 49 undergraduates completing a math task in a lab setting. Participants were asked to think aloud while interacting with different digital platforms. Then, we used sequence pattern mining to identify the digital events most predictive of post-test scores. Next, we used student verbalizations during the learning process to validate the inferences about what those predictive sequences reflected. Sequences representing learner conscientiousness predicted better performance; sequences that included pausing and rewinding videos predicted poorer performance. Some learner verbalizations co-occurred with digital events and consistently aligned with SRL processes, providing validity evidence for SRL sequences. Heterogeneity in verbal-to-digital trace alignment emerged and will require methodological advances to validate the sequences specific to individuals and task conditions.

Children who are more curious learn more in school, but little is known about how to promote curiosity-driven behaviors. In a preregistered experiment, 103 children (54 boys, 49 girls, ages 5-7 years) were randomly assigned to a condition in which they were encouraged to ask questions, or to listen carefully, during eight one-on-one science lessons over 2 weeks. Children in the question-asking condition valued new science information significantly more than children in the listening condition (Wilcoxon r = 0.23). Children with less background knowledge, as measured by their baseline vocabulary and science achievement, showed greater curiosity and learning benefits from question-asking. These results suggest that practice with question-asking can boost some aspects of curiosity and learning in science domains.

What maximizes instructional impact in early childhood? We propose a simple intervention employing Pedagogical Questions. We explore whether swapping some instructional language with questions in psychosomatic storybooks improves preschoolers' memory, learning, and generalization. Seventy-two preschoolers were randomly assigned to one of three conditions and were read storybooks employing either Direct Instruction, Pedagogical Questions, or Control content. Posttest measures of psychosomatic understanding, judgments about the possibility of psychosomatic events, and memory for storybook details showed that children in the Pedagogical Questions condition demonstrated greater memory for relevant storybook details and improved psychosomatic understanding. Our results suggest that pedagogical questions are a relatively simple educational manipulation to improve memory, learning, and transfer of theory-rich content.

Burgeoning evidence suggests that when children observe data, they use knowledge of the demonstrator's intent to augment learning. We propose that the effects of social learning may go beyond cases where children observe data, to cases where they receive no new information at all. We present a model of how simply asking a question a second time may lead to belief revision, when the questioner is expected to know the correct answer. We provide an analysis of the CHILDES corpus to show that these neutral follow‐up questions are used in parent–child conversations. We then present three experiments investigating 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's reactions to neutral follow‐up questions posed by ignorant or knowledgeable questioners. Children were more likely to change their answers in response to a neutral follow‐up question from a knowledgeable questioner than an ignorant one. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of common practices in legal, educational, and experimental psychological settings.

In studies involving human subjects, voluntary participation may lead to sampling bias, thus limiting the generalizability of findings. This effect may be especially pronounced in developmental studies, where parents serve as both the primary environmental input and decision maker of whether their child participates in a study. We present a novel empirical and modeling approach to estimate how parental consent may bias measurements of children’s behavior. Specifically, we coupled naturalistic observations of parent–child interactions in public spaces with a behavioral test with children, and used modeling methods to impute the behavior of children who did not participate. Results showed that parents’ tendency to use questions to teach was associated with both children’s behavior in the test and parents’ tendency to participate. Exploiting these associations with a model-based multiple imputation and a propensity score–matching procedure, we estimated that the means of the participating and not-participating groups could differ as much as 0.23 standard deviations for the test measurements, and standard deviations themselves are likely underestimated. These results suggest that ignoring factors associated with consent may lead to systematic biases when generalizing beyond lab samples, and the proposed general approach provides a way to estimate these biases in future research.

Questioning is a core component of formal pedagogy. Parents commonly question children, but do they use questions to teach? This article defines pedagogical questions as questions for which the questioner already knows the answer and intended to help the questionee learn. Transcripts of parent-child conversations were collected from the CHILDES database to examine the frequency and distribution of pedagogical questions. Analysis of 2,166 questions from 166 mother-child dyads and 64 father-child dyads (child's age between 2 and 6 years) showed that pedagogical questions are commonplace during day-to-day parent-child conversations and vary based on child's age, family environment, and historical era. The results serve as a first step toward understanding the role of parent-child questions in facilitating children's learning.

How can education optimize transmission of knowledge while also fostering further learning? Focusing on children at the cusp of formal schooling (N = 180, age = 4.0-6.0 y), we investigate learning after direct instruction by a knowledgeable teacher, after questioning by a knowledgeable teacher, and after questioning by a naive informant. Consistent with previous findings, instruction by a knowledgeable teacher allows effective information transmission but at the cost of exploration and further learning.Critically, we find a dual benefit for questioning by a knowledgeable teacher: Such pedagogical questioning both effectively transmits knowledge and fosters exploration and further learning, regardless of whether the question was directed to the child or directed to a third party and overheard by the child. These effects are not observed when the same question is asked by a naive informant. We conclude that a teacher's choice of pedagogical method may differentially influence learning through their choices of how, and how not, to present evidence, with implications for transmission of knowledge and self-directed discovery. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJXH2b65wL8