Collaborative pedagogy: 3-year-olds bring pedagogical cues into alignment with analogical reasoning to extract generic knowledge

TAVERNA, ANDREA S.; PADILLA, MIGDALIA I.; BAIOCCHI, MARÍA C.; PERALTA, OLGA A.

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION - EJPE

Springer

Año: 2020 vol. 36 p. 423 - 438

0256-2928

Although there is wide evidence on young children?s category learning, questionsconcerning how cognitive mechanisms and social mediation work collaboratively in thisprocess remain sparse. Here, we study the impact of pedagogy in young children?scategorization of novel artifacts. A before-and-after micro-genetic study compared 583-year-old children?s performance in four learning scenarios which varied in the waycategory information?the artifact function?was provided: (a) in one single pedagogicaldemonstration, (b) in several guided pedagogical demonstrations aimed at elicitinganalogies and inductions, or (c) employing analogies and inductions, but not in a guidedpedagogical way. Results showed that children detected the function as the central conceptual property of the novel artifact only if the information was transmitted analogically (but not inductively) in several pedagogical demonstrations contingent with children categorization performance. These findings expand the role of pedagogy in categorization at an early age, showing that pedagogical cues act in concert with certain inferential learning mechanisms helping children extract generic knowledge.