Abstract
What maximizes instructional impact in early childhood? We propose a simple intervention employing “Pedagogical Questions”. We explore whether swapping some instructional language with questions in psychosomatic storybooks improves preschoolers’ memory, learning, and generalization. Seventy-two preschoolers were randomly assigned to one of three conditions and were read storybooks employing either Direct Instruction, Pedagogical Questions, or Control content. Posttest measures of psychosomatic understanding, judgments about the possibility of psychosomatic events, and memory for storybook details showed that children in the Pedagogical Questions condition demonstrated greater memory for relevant storybook details and improved psychosomatic understanding. Our results suggest that pedagogical questions are a relatively simple educational manipulation to improve memory, learning, and transfer of theory-rich content.
Highlights
What maximizes instructional impact in early childhood? We propose a simple intervention employing “Pedagogical Questions”
To explore children’s learning of theory-rich content, we focused on the domain of psychosomatic reasoning, which is the understanding that psychological causes of physical outcomes exist
To assess improved psychosomatic understanding overall, children were given a composite score for near generalization, free explanation, and far generalization task (Fig. 2)
Summary
What maximizes instructional impact in early childhood? We propose a simple intervention employing “Pedagogical Questions”. We explore whether swapping some instructional language with questions in psychosomatic storybooks improves preschoolers’ memory, learning, and generalization. Seventytwo preschoolers were randomly assigned to one of three conditions and were read storybooks employing either Direct Instruction, Pedagogical Questions, or Control content. To explore children’s learning of theory-rich content, we focused on the domain of psychosomatic reasoning, which is the understanding that psychological causes of physical outcomes exist (e.g., feeling frustrated can cause a headache[9]). Participants read a screener storybook to ensure that they did not already endorse psychosomatic events In this screener book, the protagonist (a bunny) repeatedly displayed a biological effect (having a tummy ache) after both biological events (eating and drinking certain things) and a psychological event (e.g., feeling worried; adapted from Ref.[10]; Fig. 1). At the end of the book, children were asked to name the cause of bunny’s final tummy ache, and those who attributed the bunny’s tummy ache to a psychological cause (i.e., feeling worried) were considered to have “passed” the screening, and were subsequently dropped from the study and replaced
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