Neuroscience
Teaching young children to look away while they are thinking could help improve their problem-solving abilities.
Fiona Phelps and colleagues at Stirling University recruited 20 five-year-old children and videoed them while they answered a range of verbal and arithmetic questions of varying difficulty (e.g. “What is a telescope?”). The children were tested individually, with all questions posed by the same researcher who sat 1.5 feet in front of them. During a practice session and before the test proper, half the children were instructed to look away from the researcher while they thought of answers to the questions; the remaining children received no such instruction and acted as controls.
The researchers found that the children encouraged to look away while they were thinking, did indeed look away more than the controls (52.5 per cent of the time on average vs. 34.7 per cent). The difference was particularly noticeable for harder questions, whereas it was absent for the easy maths questions. Crucially, the children trained to look away also answered more questions correctly than the control children (72.5 per cent vs. 55.9 per cent).
The researchers said “Given that five-year-old children could readily be trained to increase their use of gaze aversion, coupled with the finding that this training could significantly benefit performance, encouragement of gaze aversion while the child is thinking appears to be a simple, yet effective way in which to significantly improve a five-year-old child’s cognitive performance”. They also suggested that the extent of a child’s gaze aversion could serve as a useful tool for identifying when children are engaged in cognitive activity.
A second experiment found that five-year-olds at the end of their first year of school engaged in more spontaneous use of gaze aversion than did five-year-olds half way through their first year, who in turn looked away more than children at the start of their first year. “What still remains open to question”, the researchers said, “is whether this developmental change occurs because of age-related advancements in the child’s cognitive development or because of increased exposure to pedagogical interactions as a result of having entered formal education”.
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Phelps, F.G., Doherty-Sneddon, G. & Warnock, H. (2006). Helping children think: Gaze aversion and teaching. British Journal of Developmental Psychology. In Press, DOI: 10.1348/026151005X49872.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Link to free, related article in The Psychologist magazine
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Neuroscience
Helping children by teaching them to look away
Teaching young children to look away while they are thinking could help improve their problem-solving abilities.
Fiona Phelps and colleagues at Stirling University recruited 20 five-year-old children and videoed them while they answered a range of verbal and arithmetic questions of varying difficulty (e.g. “What is a telescope?”). The children were tested individually, with all questions posed by the same researcher who sat 1.5 feet in front of them. During a practice session and before the test proper, half the children were instructed to look away from the researcher while they thought of answers to the questions; the remaining children received no such instruction and acted as controls.
The researchers found that the children encouraged to look away while they were thinking, did indeed look away more than the controls (52.5 per cent of the time on average vs. 34.7 per cent). The difference was particularly noticeable for harder questions, whereas it was absent for the easy maths questions. Crucially, the children trained to look away also answered more questions correctly than the control children (72.5 per cent vs. 55.9 per cent).
The researchers said “Given that five-year-old children could readily be trained to increase their use of gaze aversion, coupled with the finding that this training could significantly benefit performance, encouragement of gaze aversion while the child is thinking appears to be a simple, yet effective way in which to significantly improve a five-year-old child’s cognitive performance”. They also suggested that the extent of a child’s gaze aversion could serve as a useful tool for identifying when children are engaged in cognitive activity.
A second experiment found that five-year-olds at the end of their first year of school engaged in more spontaneous use of gaze aversion than did five-year-olds half way through their first year, who in turn looked away more than children at the start of their first year. “What still remains open to question”, the researchers said, “is whether this developmental change occurs because of age-related advancements in the child’s cognitive development or because of increased exposure to pedagogical interactions as a result of having entered formal education”.
___________________________________
Phelps, F.G., Doherty-Sneddon, G. & Warnock, H. (2006). Helping children think: Gaze aversion and teaching. British Journal of Developmental Psychology. In Press, DOI: 10.1348/026151005X49872.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Link to free, related article in The Psychologist magazine
- Philosophy For Kids
Teaching children the art of collaborative philosophical inquiry brings them persistent, long-term cognitive benefits, according to psychologists in Scotland. Keith Topping and Steve Trickey first reported the short-term benefits of using "Thinking through...
- Musical Training Changes Children's Brains
Psychologists have discovered that musical training not only changes the way young children’s brains respond to sounds – it also boosts their memory performance. Takako Fujioka and colleagues looked at how the brains of 12 children aged between 4...
- Educational Tv Must Overcome Young Children's 'video Deficit'
Designers of educational television for young children face a major stumbling block: two-year-old children tend to ignore information presented to them on a TV screen. For example, in an initial study by Georgene Troseth and colleagues, two-year-olds...
- Does The Way Mothers Think About Their Difficult Children Matter?
Early findings have shown that the mothers of badly behaved young children think about their child’s behaviour in a characteristic way, tending to believe that their bad behaviour is intentional and has to do with the nature of the child rather than...
- Do Mums Know About Child Development?
An American study has tested how much mothers know about child development, safety issues in raising children, infant sleeping habits and nutrition. Two hundred and three women at a paediatric clinic and an obstetric clinic in a southern state in America...