Main content

Children's developing theory of mind and pedagogical evidence selection: Experiment 2  /

Contributors:
  1. Mason Hanson
  2. Dhaya Ramarajan
  3. Henry Wellman

Date created: | Last Updated:

: DOI | ARK

Creating DOI. Please wait...

Create DOI

Category: Project

Description: Natural pedagogy emerges early in development, but good teaching requires tailoring evidence to learners’ knowledge. How does the ability to reason about others’ minds support early pedagogical evidence selection abilities? In three experiments (N = 205), we investigated preschool-aged children’s ability to consider others’ knowledge when selecting evidence in the service of teaching. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that four-year-olds reliably selected evidence to rectify others’ false beliefs, and provided causal explanations in their teaching, whereas three-year-olds did not. In Experiment 2, we tie children’s evidence selection abilities to Theory of Mind (ToM) development, above and beyond effects of age and numerical conservation abilities. In Experiment 3, we employed a 6-week training of children’s pedagogical evidence selection with a new teaching task, and further explored the relationship between these skills and children’s ToM abilities. We qualitatively replicated our results from Experiment 2, and report tentative evidence for a link between the pedagogical training and improvements in ToM. Together, our findings suggest important connections between reasoning about others’ minds and evidential reasoning in natural pedagogy in early childhood.

Files

Loading files...

Citation

Tags

Recent Activity

Loading logs...

OSF does not support the use of Internet Explorer. For optimal performance, please switch to another browser.
Accept
This website relies on cookies to help provide a better user experience. By clicking Accept or continuing to use the site, you agree. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and information on cookie use.
Accept
×

Start managing your projects on the OSF today.

Free and easy to use, the Open Science Framework supports the entire research lifecycle: planning, execution, reporting, archiving, and discovery.