Exploring Teaching Skills in Young Children.

CALERO CECILIA I; MARIANO SEMELMAN; MARIANO SIGMAN

Huerta Grande, Córdoba

Congreso; XXVI Reunión Anual de la SAN; 2011

SAN

While current neuroscience and psychology has provided a vast corpus of information about the learning brain, very little is known about the teaching brain and the psychological organization, development, and phenomenology of the ability to teach. Paradoxically, teaching (Caro, 1992) has been proposed as a cognitive skill unique to human culture (Gegerly, 2005). We propose that teaching is a natural ability that matures in the first years of life, without the need for formal education. In the present work, we began to investigate the spontaneous progression of the teaching capacities in young children and its relation to their own learning experience. We examined kids’ understanding of the correspondence between teaching and learning in games in which rule are learned based on inference and then explained to an adult. We also investigate meta-cognition, assessing the degree of awareness that they have of these mechanisms during development. Preliminary results suggest that children as young as three year old, capable to use screening-off information to learn the causal structure of biological events (Schulz, 2004), spontaneously transmit this knowledge to others, using well known ostensive cues which denote a pedagogical intention.