Understanding How Young Children Learn

Bringing the Science of Child Development to the Classroom

Wendy L. Ostroff L. Ostroff

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781416614227
• eBook ISBN: 9781416615040
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Human beings are born to learn. During the last few decades, developmental science has exploded with discoveries of how, specifically, learning happens. This provides us with an unprecedented window into children's minds: how and when they begin to think, perceive, understand, and apply knowledge.

Wendy Ostroff builds on this research and shows you how to harness the power of the brain, the most powerful learning machine in the universe. She highlights the processes that inspire or propel learning--play, confidence, self-regulation, movement, mnemonic strategies, metacognition, articulation, and collaboration--and distills the research into a synthesis of the most important takeaway ideas that teachers will need as they design their curriculum and pedagogy. Each chapter has suggested activities for exactly how teachers can put theory into practice in the classroom.

When you understand how your students learn, you will know how to teach them in ways that harness the brain's natural learning systems.

Dr. Wendy L. Ostroff is Associate Professor in the Program for the Advancement of Learning at Curry College.

Chapter 1

Understanding Children’s Motivation

mo·ti·va·tion is the driving desire behind all action and is the precursor and cornerstone to learning. It is no exaggeration to say that children have boundless energy for living and learning. From an evolutionary perspective, behaviors that are important for survival (like eating or reproducing) must be pleasurable to do in and of themselves. Young children survive by exploring their world via manipulation, locomotion, language, and social interaction. But they also love doing these things. The immediate satisfaction of "being good at" something also has adaptive significance for cognitive growth. To motivate children and keep them primed for the best learning possible, we must understand how motivation to learn develops.

A Developmental Science Approach to Motivation

Motivation is a readiness (or a setup) to learn. Throughout life we learn incredibly complex skills without consciously trying at all. As the British developmental scientist John L. Locke (1995) notes, infants and children do not set out to learn any of the vast repertoire of skills that they gain in the first years. Instead, they study the faces, voices, and actions of others out of a deep biological need for emotional interaction with those who love and care for them. They simply find themselves in a social and cultural context that values certain skills and uses them constantly. Learning, then, is an unintended bonus. It is a byproduct of wanting to do other things, like receive a smile from your conversational partner or be soothed by your mother’s voice.

Across tens of thousands of years of human evolution, certain proclivities on the part of the infant and child have emerged. In the same way, social and cultural mannerisms have arisen around children and in support of their learning. When it comes to understanding where motivation comes from, we should consider both those things that children actively try to master and those things that they just pick up along the way. Children’s learning is dynamic and results from the interaction between inborn capacity and experience.

Desire to learn is present even before birth. As their world is suddenly filled with new things to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, fetuses and new babies develop reflexive behaviors to organize that information and to make meaning from it. Reflexes have evolved to help the young of a species to adapt to its environment. The rooting and suckling reflexes, for example, guarantee that a helpless infant takes in the milk it needs to survive. Sometimes reflexes develop into more complex modes of behavior and set up learning. They are important clues to the development of motivation.

Motivation Propeller 1: Habituation and Novelty Preference

Within minutes of Mr. Frymer turning his back to the second-grade class and beginning to write multiplication problems on the board, Aaron begins to zone out. He fiddles with his pencil and rummages through his desk. It is not until he notices the back of Samantha’s neck in front of him that his interest is piqued again. With full engagement and vigor, Aaron begins tearing the corners off of his math worksheet and rolling spitballs.

Beginning in infancy and throughout the life span, humans are motivated by newness, change, and excitement. Habituation, the tendency to lose interest in a repeated event and gain interest in a new one, is one of the most fundamental human reflexes. If the thermostat were to suddenly turn the air conditioning on, you would hear the loud humming sound begin, but within minutes you couldn’t even hear it if you tried. Habituation, a fundamental property of the nervous system, provides mechanisms to ignore the environment when it presents no immediate threat or reward, and to focus attention on potentially important new input. Habituation is also an elementary form of inhibition, the complex cognitive maneuver that allows us to override urges. This reflects the function of the frontal lobes of the brain. Finally, habituation is considered to be the simplest form of learning. Habituation is important to understand in relation to children’s motivation, because if children are habituating to the learning situation of the classroom, their attention and interest will decline.

Habituation and Learning

Developmental scientists use the habituation response to measure attention, perception, and cognition. Because fetuses and infants cannot tell us about the workings of their minds, researchers must glean what they perceive and understand from behaviors that are in their repertoire. Habituation studies can be done in utero, by presenting fetuses with information (often sounds plus vibration) via headphones on their mothers’ bellies. The fetuses’ responses are then monitored with ultrasound. After many presentations of the same stimulus, fetuses will habituate (stop moving their bodies in response), at which point the vibrating sound will be switched to something new (e.g., a tone of a different pitch). If a fetus moves in response to the new tone, scientists infer that it perceived a difference between the two tones (McCorry & Hepper, 2007).

Habituation can also be used to assess infants’ learning after birth. Infants will look at something when they are interested and turn to look away when they become bored. So if we show an infant a repeated display of events until he or she looks away and then switch to a new display (which may be only slightly different), we can determine whether the infant noticed the difference. The habituation response has been linked to both attention and language. Studies have shown that young infants who habituate quickly to complex events have greater vocabularies as toddlers than those for whom habituation takes longer (Dixon & Smith, 2008; Tamis-Lemonda & Bornstein, 1989). Habituation assessments in the first year of life also predict IQ between 1 and 8 years of age (McCall & Carriger, 1993). Rapid habituation reflects the ability to quickly encode an event into memory and to recognize it easily when it is presented again.

Novelty and Learning

After habituating to an environmental event (like the air conditioning) and ceasing to notice it, your attention may be involuntarily drawn to a new stimulating event. The brain is highly responsive to novelty (Wolfe, 2006). The preference for novel objects and events is a very important clue into the workings of motivation. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1843/1985) believed that the only way to overcome boredom was to respond to the world like a child: be inquisitive and curious, and marvel at everything. Scientists have explained novelty preference as an efficient way for infants’ and young children’s immature cognitive system to process information. Once a child has mastered all of the information an object or event offers, paying attention to something new allows him or her to acquire additional information in a short amount of time. It is also a great strategy for getting little ones’ attention away from things we don’t want them to do. Just yesterday, I used the novelty preference to lure my young son Alexei away from biting the soles of my sneakers (a new and unsanitary habit of his) and toward his wooden train kept high and hidden on the bookshelf. A simple "choo-choo!" sound was all it took to reorient him toward the train, and the sneakers had lost all their appeal. Infants and children have shown a behavioral, perceptual, and emotional preference for novelty across a wide age range, in experiments on memory, language, speech-sound categorization, and number (Diamond, 1995; Lipton & Spelke, 2003; Quinn & Eimas, 1996; Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996).

Infants who lack novelty preference tend to have cognitive delays during childhood. Additionally, novelty preference (just like habituation) is predictive of later cognitive functioning. Infants with a stronger preference for novelty at just 6 months old have better memories, language skills, and motor skills when they grow to be toddlers and children (Colombo, Mitchell, Dodd, Coldren, & Horowitz, 1989; Fagan & Knevel, 1989; Thompson, Fagan, & Fulker, 1991). It follows then, that the desire to learn new things is a deeply embedded part of being human.

Infant novelty preference develops into childhood curiosity and desire for exploration. In order to survive, animals must actively explore. All living things have an urge called "perceptual curiosity," which drives them to examine new things. The newer, more complex, or more unexpected the thing, the more deeply it will satisfy this urge. Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1927) termed this the "investigatory reflex." When presented with a new, attractive, or surprising object in laboratory settings, children display their drive to explore, which clearly can only be satisfied by attending to, perceiving, or manipulating the object in question. Never-before-seen objects that call to be examined via touching and manipulation (boxes with lights, buttons, and levers, and plants with shiny ribbons on them, for instance) are almost irresistible to a young child.

Exploration in children sets them up to learn. Russian developmental scientist Alexander Zaporozhets (as cited in Berlyne, 1960) discovered that children automatically expose themselves to the important characteristics of a situation. They experiment with anything and everything they can, in preparation for carrying out difficult actions. In a number of experiments in his laboratory, children were trained to press buttons in a certain order (corresponding to lights being flashed) or to push a toy car through a maze. Upon entering the lab, the children would spontaneously do things to acquaint themselves with the buttons, lights, and other features of the apparatus. In fact, they could not be restrained from doing so! In younger children, the most prominent forms of exploration were touching and feeling movements of the hands and fingers. This was replaced by eye movements as the children’s age increased. Perhaps most striking, the more time children spent on their preliminary inspection, the less time it took for them to master the actions they were asked to perform.

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Remember:

Newness, change, and excitement motivate learning.

Habituation and novelty preference reflect children’s ability to encode quickly and correspond to their attention, perception, and cognition.

The brain is highly responsive to novelty.

Exploration sets up opportunities for learning.

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How to Enhance Classroom Motivation Using Habituation and Novelty Preference

Create a secure, predictable structure, with clear expectations and boundaries, from which to divert.

To avoid habituation and foster novelty in your classroom, you don’t have to throw all the rules out the window. On the contrary, children with the most solid foundations are the most willing to explore and experiment with new things. When setting up a classroom full of surprises and newness, do so while ensuring that the students’ basic needs of security are met. This will allow them to feel safe to go out on a limb, to try new things and to play with ideas. Clear expectations and boundaries are a crucial foundation from which to springboard into the unknown and exciting.

Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Rudolf Steiner (1919) believed that young children gain great security from rituals and harmonious transitions between events. In the Waldorf model of education, based on Steiner’s philosophies, transition routines like songs or candles are used for daily activities and to give a form to the day, providing security for the children. Daily rituals offer an inner, bodily knowledge that can then allow children to adapt more smoothly to change. Likewise, connecting with cycles of the year can provide a sense of predictability for children. Nature, though ever changing, is still recognizable. Teachers of young children also claim that strong routines greatly decrease discipline issues.

Set up daily, weekly, and seasonal rituals in your classroom. Beginning the day with a song, a rhyme, or a check-in with each student creates the predictability and comfort that allows for the exploration and risk of learning. Keep seasonal rhythms in mind when designing lessons, including the less obvious ones such as harvests, solstices, and equinoxes. For example, an interdisciplinary autumnal equinox lesson might include tree bark rubbings, paintings each day using a single fall color (e.g., red on Monday, orange on Tuesday), units on animals who store nuts for the winter, charting fall temperatures, or understanding photosynthesis.

Locate the drama in the content of the lesson.

Sociologist James Loewen’s work (2007) has shown that American history is full of fantastic, shocking, and important stories to engage novelty preference and avoid habituation. And yet, even elementary social studies students groan when it’s time for history lessons. Textbooks present a version of history that is boring and predictable, with every problem easily solved, and with the exclusion of all conflict or suspense. Across curriculum areas, children do get hooked into curiosity when they are shown the drama of the subject, when they are asked to speculate on outcomes of controversies, when they are encouraged to explore mysteries and puzzles, or when they are shown competing answers to dilemmas. This can even be done in math, a field with a reputation for being boring and fixed (but one that is actually filled with controversy, crisis, and change). Sixth grade teacher Margaret Anderson always begins her discussion of square roots with the history of Greek mathematician Pythagoras, and his finding that the square root of two was an irrational number. Imagine the crisis to a civilization based entirely on reason!

Ask children to consider the complexity of the past by exploring vastly different points of view on the same events. For example, before presenting historical "facts" in a social studies/language arts unit on slavery, encourage your students to piece together history from different information sources. You can include such diverse perspectives as slave narratives, excerpts from the autobiographies of slave-owning American presidents like Thomas Jefferson, clips of films that represent slavery, or documents showing that some of the earliest settlers in the United States were from Africa. You might ask the students to write journal entries in different voices—that of a working slave, a runaway slave, a slave owner, a Quaker family hiding runaway slaves, or a slave catcher making money by returning runaway slaves (Czajka, 2004). You could stage a debate or a play as a dramatic finale to this powerful unit. Most importantly, you will be priming the students’ minds for curiosity and exploration into new intellectual territory.

Stimulate, engage, and delight not only your students but also yourself.

Novelty motivates teachers as much as students. Teaching topics that you are newly energized about or experimenting with new teaching styles can model engagement to your students. As a teacher, you have the unique opportunity to be constantly learning on the job. I have discovered that the most effective courses that I teach (in terms of both student enthusiasm and student learning) are those that are exciting to me. When the content or method is novel, I do have to work a bit harder preparing for each class, but the payoff is tenfold. My passion is sincere, and my students and I are motivated to understand the topics, frameworks, or ideologies together. It sounds like a risky position for a t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Learning, Teaching, and Developmental Science
• Chapter 1. Understanding Children’s Motivation
• Chapter 2. Understanding Children’s Attention
• Chapter 3. Understanding Children’s Memory
• Chapter 4. Understanding Children’s Cognition and Action
• Conclusion
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources: Understanding How Children Learn
• Study Guide
• Copyright