January 1st, 1994 | RESEARCH
Constraints on learning, rather than being unique to evolutionarily privileged domains, may operate in nonprivileged domains as well. Understanding of the goals that strategies must meet seems to play an especially important role in these domains in constraining the strategies even before they use them. THe presente experiments showed that children can use their conceptual understanding to accurately evaluate strategies that they not only do not yet use but hat are more conceptually advanced than the strategies they do not use. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds who did not yet use the min strategy for adding numbers judged it to be smarter than an equally novel illegitimate strategy, and to be just as smart as their typical strategy of counting from one. In Experiment 2, 9-year-olds who did not yet use the forking strategy to play tic-tac-toe judged it to be even smarter than their own win/block approach. The results demonstrated a large number of commonalities between the functioning of constraints in privileged and nonprivileged domains, as well as suggesting some possible differences.
Document
(no document provided)
Team Members
Robert Siegler, Author, Carnegie-Mellon UniversityKevin Crowley, Author, University of Pittsburgh
Citation
Identifier Type: ISSN
Identifier: 0010-0285
Publication: Cognitive Psychology
Volume: 27
Page(s): 194
Funders
Funding Source: NIH
Related URLs
Tags
Access and Inclusion: Low Socioeconomic Status
Audience: Elementary School Children (6-10) | Evaluators | Museum | ISE Professionals | Pre-K Children (0-5) | Scientists
Discipline: Education and learning science | Mathematics | Social science and psychology
Resource Type: Peer-reviewed article | Research Products
Environment Type: Games | Simulations | Interactives | Media and Technology