Alison Gopnik’s research lab at UC Berkeley recently posted a new article describing their research on how young children respond to direct instruction vs. naive demonstration.

You can read the .pdf of the article “Children’s Imitation of Causal Action Sequences” by Buchsbaum, Gopnik, Griffiths & Shafto or the summarized article in Slate: “Why Preschools Shouldn’t Be Like School” written by Alison Gopnik.

The results indicate that children who are directly instructed on how to engage with a toy by a teacher tend to ‘overimitate’ and only engage with the toy in the way they were instructed. Children who were shown the toy by naive demonstrator,who did no teaching, tended to engage with the toy for a longer duration, more creatively and even, oddly enough, more efficiently. The research underscores our disconnect between how children are taught to learn and how they learn. Other studies on this subject also support the theory that children are not being organized along a path of hierarchical, accumulative development, but rather considered the malleable and vital ‘research and development’ department of our species.

(Preschool R&D Department)

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