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Young Children's Help-Seeking as Active Information Gathering

Christopher Vredenburgh1, Tamar Kushnir1

  • 1Department of Human Development, Cornell University.

Cognitive Science
|April 29, 2015
PubMed

Insights

Preschoolers use help-seeking strategically to learn. Children seek more assistance on difficult tasks and when they have lower initial competency, adjusting their requests to optimize learning opportunities.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Development
  • Social Learning Theory

Background:

  • Social learning is crucial for young children's development.
  • Help-seeking in children is often viewed as a social information-gathering strategy.
  • Understanding how children utilize help-seeking can illuminate their learning processes.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate preschoolers' help-seeking behavior as a means of social information gathering.
  • To determine if children's help-seeking is influenced by their initial competency and task difficulty.
  • To examine how the level of assistance sought relates to competency and task difficulty.

Main Methods:

  • Preschoolers (mean age 52.44 months) participated in a toy assembly task.
  • Children's competency in assembling toys and the difficulty of each task step were assessed.
  • Help-seeking behaviors and the magnitude of assistance requested were recorded.

Main Results:

  • Children's help-seeking increased on more difficult task steps.
  • Less competent children sought assistance more frequently than more competent children.
  • The magnitude of help-seeking requests correlated with both child competency and task difficulty.

Conclusions:

  • Preschoolers' help-seeking is a flexible, adaptive learning strategy.
  • Children strategically adjust the amount and type of help they seek based on task demands and their own abilities.
  • Help-seeking effectively supports children's learning and information acquisition.

Keywords:
Active learningHelp-seekingInformation gatheringPreschoolersScaffoldingSocial learning

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