For much of the 20th century, educators took their cues about teaching and learning from psychologists, such as Piaget and Vygotsky. How does what we are learning today about the mental development of young children differ from what these cognitive scientists told us?
The current field is using new and rigorous experimental techniques, not clinical observation, to look at what is going on in the mind of the child in the first years of life. Although Piaget and Vygotsky set the foundation for the field, we are going beyond their thinking.
Piaget contributed the ideas that children's minds develop in an orderly way and that they think in slightly different ways than adults do. Children have their own framework for looking at things, and they interpret the world through the filter of their cognitive structures.
Vygotsky contributed the idea that social interaction is important for learning, that children are not just independent problem solvers but learn from adults and other children. He, more than Piaget, emphasized the importance of social interaction. And he was, of course, correct about that.
By the way, both Piaget and Vygotsky would have loved the idea that new scientific data are causing revisions in their original theories—they appreciated that theories are dynamic structures that change with new evidence. For example, we've discovered that babies and young children are more competent and can learn more than the original theories had assumed. As we develop better scientific instruments for examining the minds of children, children seem to become more and more competent. In truth, it is because we adult scientists are becoming more clever in our ways of questioning them and better at listening to what they have to say.
What are scientists finding today that builds on this foundation?
Cognitive developmental psychologists are now actually looking into the crib to study the development of the mind early on, even before children develop language. And what we find there is very interesting. We find a little scientist peering back at us—a child who is desperately interested in making sense of the people, the objects, and the language around him or her, a child doing mini-experiments to try to sort everything out.
When we think of scientists, we think of methodical approaches to solving problems. How is that approach similar to what young children do cognitively?
There seems to be a deep kinship between adults doing science and children learning. Some of the principles are the same: forming hypotheses, making predictions, doing experiments to test ideas. Even babies have theories of the world, very simple theories, but cognitive structures about how people, things, and language work.
When a child goes through stages of development, he or she abandons an old theory and adopts a new one. That new theory leads children to make new predictions and to be open to new information and to collaborative studies.
What would constitute a collaborative study for a young child?
Working with teachers is a collaborative study. Working with a parent is a collaborative study. The children use data to revise their conceptions. One of the most wondrous things about children is their openness to new information and their willingness to change.
You mentioned earlier that babies do mini-experiments to make sense of their world. What types of experiments would a child be engaged in and why?
Well, for example, 18-month-old children often will build towers of blocks and knock them down again just to build them up. The children seem to be interested in doing scientific explorations of support and containment. What is interesting is when these towers fall over, children often say "uh, oh." This turns out to be a very early word.
What is especially interesting about the child's use of "uh, oh?"
Traditionally, researchers thought that early words were just names of objects like "mamma," "juice," and "ball." But when linguists went into the homes of babies to study the early words babies used, they found mysterious words like "uh, oh" and "all gone." Even though they are not labels for objects, these expressions figure very importantly in the young child's world. "All gone" signals that something that you know exists is no longer in visual perception. It can only come into babies' vocabulary after they have developed what scientists call object permanence, that is, the belief that objects continue to exist when out of sight. Just about the time that children are developing object permanence, they develop words like "all gone." And similarly, at about the time that they are able to make plans for the future to accomplish a goal, they develop words like "uh, oh," which signals that their plan went awry. So when the tower falls down by accident, children say "uh, oh."
Listening to children has led us to revise our ideas about the relation between thought and language. We now realize that language is not just used to label physical objects, but also used to label significant cognitive thoughts—such as children's beliefs about the invisible, their intentions, and their desires about their own actions and those of others.
And these thoughts build one from the other as the children interact with objects and the people around them?
Yes. Babies are not born with clean slates. Human beings come into the world with a number of behavior patterns. Babies are born with an evolutionary past that gives them ideas about how the world will work. They also learn from others, which transforms the innate structures that they are born with.
This is where Vygotsky made his profound contribution to our understanding of human nature. He suggested that nurture, how we are changed by others, is part of our nature.
That seems to imply that the age-old question of whether learning is primarily nature or nurture is, in fact, a moot point.
There is no real conflict between nature and nurture, no conflict between biology and culture. What is unique about human biology is that we depend on other people for learning. We are influenced deeply by our teachers, parents, and peers. I like to say that we humans are born to learn.
And the behavior patterns that we are born with change as a result of the interactions we have with others?
Exactly. Social input is incredibly important for behavioral, cognitive, and emotional change. That is where imitation and observational learning come in. Children, even babies, are using us as role models. They watch carefully what we do and try to incorporate that into their behavior.
Young children absorb an amazing amount through watching and listening to us. You can see it in the 3-year-old girl who is walking around the house wearing her mother's necklace and nightgown. The parent might say, "Please don't wear my nightgown; don't put on my necklace." But the 3-year-old will walk around like that anyway because she wants to be like Mama. And the 3- or 4-year-old boy will put shaving cream on his peachskin-smooth face and use a Popsicle stick to make believe he is shaving because he wants to be like Daddy. In other words, children often do as we do, not as we say, and this applies at home and in the classroom.
Children are fascinated by us. There is no biological, innate tendency to desire telephones, so why do children like them so much? In our culture, when a telephone rings, someone jumps up from the table, runs across the room, and picks it up. Some people carry telephones in their purses; some people have them attached to their belts. Little children 12 to 16 months of age see that these things are deeply coveted by human beings and they think, "I want to have one of those. I want to be like an adult." In a sense, the caretaker is the baby's favorite toy.
In other words, the activities that children engage in that adults call play are actually profound learning experiences.
Absolutely! Play is vitally important for children. That is why we should not be obsessed with trying to provide extra stimulation for babies by putting them on a regimen of listening to Mozart tapes or watching flash cards so that they get ahead of the child next door.
Babies and young children learn a tremendous amount by just playing around. Play is really quite serious business. They are transforming the world and trying out possibilities, repeating things to master them. Making things your own and exploring your own interests are deeply important for human development.
Some of the greatest scientists and poets have described how much they learned in childhood during play, often with a supportive adult. Einstein told the story of being given a magnet by a teacher when he was a young child. He saw the needle move and thought, "There must be unseen forces here, and when I grow up, I want to explore those unseen forces." He still talked about that childhood incident when he was an adult.
How can teachers use this information to promote learning in school?
A lot of brain research and developmental research shows that very young children, and probably all of us, learn better in a stress-free environment. Teachers should want to have nonthreatening classrooms that foster exploration and discovery so that children can test their cognitive and emotional limits. Also, stimulating, varied input is important for development, starting from the earliest ages all the way up through college and into adulthood. For babies, this translates into multisensory stimulation. For school-age children, it means sometimes giving visual examples, sometimes auditory examples, and sometimes tactile-kinesthetic examples.
Activity in learning is very important. Children don't learn well from having information passively presented to them. Infants love to learn through active exploration—through play—where they are changing the world and manipulating it. They will hide an object and uncover it 15 times in a row, observing what happens. School-age children also like concrete manipulation and active, meaningful exploration. They need time to make predictions about whether the world confirms or does not confirm the predictions they have in mind. They need time to digest what they have learned. This applies to reading, math, the arts, and science. Children, like adult scientists and poets, need time to play, transform, and test the limits of their own perspectives. This is part of learning and development and also opens children up to formal instruction from others.
What does science tell us about how feedback from the teacher can influence the learning process?
Young children connect actions with what follows them only when the action and its consequences are close in time. You cannot respond an hour later to what an infant is doing and expect the infant to make sense of it. For school-age children, providing that timely, accurate feedback is important when they are solving problems or doing an activity. It is a joy to watch a teacher or parent who not only praises and corrects, but also provides new information and prompts the child to rethink and look at the problem or puzzle in a new way.
There is much controversy about the importance of environment and early stimulation to preserve brain cells in young children. What can you tell us about this that will be helpful to educators?
It is part of our biology to be influenced by our environment, but there is something of a dispute about early stimulation. The dispute arises from the misconception that all stimulation or environmental input is the same. Scientists like to distinguish among three levels of environment: deprived environment, normal environment, and enriched environment.
Being in a deprived environment is devastating to a child's development. In tragic cases where a child has been locked in a closet or isolated from human interaction for years, the child has not developed normally. If a severely isolated child is found after he has grown to puberty, you cannot teach that child language and his or her social development will absolutely never be normal.
In a normal environment, the ordinary input from parents and teachers is important for child development. We know from language learning that children are not making up the language themselves. They are grasping it from everyday conversations with the adults and children around them. Everyday human interaction is crucial for normal development.
A controversy surrounds the concept of an enriched environment: Is an enriched environment somehow better for a normally developing child? When scientists discovered that children know more and learn faster than we ever dreamed, people—especially some who were marketing CDs—misinterpreted the findings. They advertised that scientific knowledge proved that we need to provide extra stimulation for babies.
The developmental psychologists themselves are very fond of emphasizing the dramatic learning that takes place in early infancy. But the science does not support the idea that extra stimulation above and beyond natural interaction is necessary or important for cognitive or emotional growth. Developmental psychologists feel as much at a loss as the parents do about the pressure that is being put on parents by society. There is no scientific data to suggest that parents can build a super baby or a genius baby.
Of course, we do not want to isolate a child in a room with white walls, without social interaction, without an attentive and sensitive adult caretaker—it does not have to be the mother or father; it can be a daycare worker or health professional—interacting with that child. Every child needs some adult to care for and pay attention to him or her. If you drop below this normal environment, you have a deprived environment and it can have a devastating effect.
Neuroscientists have discovered that before birth and in early childhood, children experience an exuberant growth of brain cells. Then, gradually, some of the connections among cells are eliminated or pruned. How concerned should educators and parents be about preserving brain cells and synapses?
I hope that the thought of losing synaptic connections is not terrifying educators and parents nowadays, but I am afraid it probably is, given some of the publicity in the popular press. Pruning neural connections is a natural process. It is part of normal development.
Take language, for example. When babies are born and in the first six months of life, they can discriminate all the speech sounds used in all the world's languages, even though they have not heard them yet. For instance, Japanese adults do not make the distinction between R and L; the sounds are not phonemic in their language. Six-month-old Japanese babies do make the distinction between R and L. Babies are, as we say, born citizens of the world.
A very interesting developmental change occurs in language. Children actually lose some of the distinctions that they had as infants. By as early as 10 or 12 months of age, the Japanese babies become more like the adults. They become culture-bound language listeners and they now have lost the ability to distinguish R from L. The same thing happens with English, Spanish, and other languages around the world. Babies are born with the ability to distinguish all the speech sounds and then they lose some of that ability as they learn their own specific language. What they lose in universality, they gain in speed and depth of processing for their own specific language.
What educators and parents need to understand is that neural sculpting—the tuning-in of a child to his or her particular environment and focusing on the patterns—is a natural part of human growth and actually quite beneficial. We want U.S. children to learn to speak English and behave the way we do in America. And people in other cultures want their children to learn that language and behave the way they do in those cultures. One of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings is that we are influenced by our culture. In fact, a new area of neuroscience is to examine how culture and environment influence brain development. Neural pruning is not something to be frightened of in the least. Some of the most revolutionary and far-reaching discoveries in developmental science over the next decade may come from research in this area.
There has been a lot of attention focused on learning before the age of 3. Some believe this early learning is more important than learning at any other age. What is your view?
People used to think that before children learned to talk, children were not thinking, problem-solving human beings. The new research proves that they are. That is why we see pictures of babies on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Those of us who study early learning were flabbergasted by the competence of babies and young children, and the discoveries began to grab a lot of attention. The first three years of life are foundational and terribly important, but I would emphasize that learning does not stop at 3 years of age. I am a college professor. I hope my students learn from me. I know I have learned from them.
When we can get the scientists and the educators together to connect learning from 0 to 3 with learning from 3 and beyond, then we will really be getting somewhere. The window for learning does not slam shut when a child gets to be 3. That contradicts the everyday experience of parents and educators. Learning is a lifelong enterprise. The surprise is that it begins so early, but the enduring truth is that it continues into adulthood. Human beings have a natural drive to learn and experience a pleasure in finding things out. This applies to teachers, scientists, and even our youngest children.
