Do teachers’ conflicting testimonies influence children’s decisions about unconventional rules of counting?
Loading...
Official URL
Full text at PDC
Publication date
2016
Advisors (or tutors)
Editors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer
Citations
Exportar
Citation
Enesco, I., Rodríguez, P., Lago, M. O., Dopico, C., & Escudero, A. (2017). Do teachers’ conflicting testimonies influence children’s decisions about unconventional rules of counting? European Journal of Psychology of Education, 32(3), 483-500. https://doi.org/10.1007/S10212-016-0319-4
Abstract
This study addresses the influence of schoolteachers’ testimonies on children’s conceptions about unconventional correct counts or pseudoerrors. A total of 158 kindergarteners and second graders were individually interviewed: Fifty children participated in the baseline group (to determine their judgments about pseudoerrors without the presence of informants), and 108 children participated in the experimental group. There were two sessions—2 weeks apart—for the experimental group: in session 1, children faced the conflicting claims provided by three teachers vs. a dissident teacher about the correctness of different pseudoerrors made by the characters of a computer game. The participants had to decide which of the informants was right, providing a rationale for their choice. In session 2, children evaluated the same types of pseudoerrors but in absence of informants (similar to the baseline group procedure). We assessed the relative influence of the majority, and whether the presentation of teachers’ controversial judgments improved children’s understanding of counting. The findings revealed that children’s own ideas prevailed over the pressure of the majority: at both ages, children tended to endorse claims that considered pseudoerrors as incorrect counts, regardless of the source of information (majority or dissenter), and their tendency to reject pseudoerrors remained firm in session 2. Overall, results from the experimental and the baseline groups suggest that children’s adherence to the conventional rules of counting is strong and little susceptible to influence and revision. We discuss the educational implications of these findings as well as the limitations of the experimental paradigm used in this and other studies in the field of testimony.
Description
This study was funded by a project grant (PSI2012-31477) from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain. We thank the school centers Santa María del Carmen, Juan Gris and Andrés Segovia (Madrid, Spain), and all of the participants for their cooperation.
Referencias bibliográficas:
• Bernard, S., Proust, J., & Clément, F. (2015). Four- to six-year-old children’s sensitivity to reliability versus consensus in the endorsement of object labels. Child Development, 86, 1112–1124. doi:10.1111/cdev.12366.
• Birch, S. A. J., Vauthier, S. A., & Bloom, P. (2008). Three- and four-year-olds spontaneously use others’ past performance to guide their learning. Cognition, 107, 1018–1034. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.12.008.
• Briars, D., & Siegler, R. S. (1984). A featural analysis of preschoolers’ counting knowledge. Developmental Psychology, 20, 607–618. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.20.4.607.
• Chan, C. C. Y. (2011). The role of prior belief in children’s trust in testimony: a social ecological approach (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (UMI No. 3458832).
• Corriveau, K. H., & Harris, P. L. (2009). Choosing your informant: weighing familiarity and recent accuracy. Developmental Science, 12, 426–437. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00792.x.
• Corriveau, K. H., & Harris, P. L. (2010). Preschoolers (sometimes) defer to the majority when making simple perceptual judgments. Developmental Psychology, 46, 437–445. doi:10.1037/a0017553.
• Corriveau, K. H., Fusaro, M., & Harris, P. L. (2009). Going with the flow: preschoolers prefer non-dissenters as informants. Psychological Science, 20, 372–377. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02291.x.
• Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51, 629–636. doi:10.1037/h0046408.
• Einav, S. (2014). Does the majority always know best? Young children’s flexible trust in majority opinion. PLoS ONE, 9(8), e104585. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104585.
• Escudero, A., Rodríguez, P., Lago, M. O., & Enesco, I. (2015). A 3-year longitudinal study of children’s comprehension of counting: do they recognize the optional nature of nonessential counting features? Cognitive Development, 33, 73–83. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2014.05.003.
• Gelman, R., & Gallistel, C. R. (1978). The child’s understanding of number. Cambridge: Harvard Press.
• Gelman, R., & Meck, E. (1983). Preschoolers’ counting: principles before skills. Cognition, 13, 343–359. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(83)90014-8.
• Gelman, S. A., Ware, E. A., Manczak, E. M., & Graham, S. A. (2013). Children’s sensitivity to the knowledge expressed in pedagogical and nonpedagogical contexts. Developmental Psychology, 49, 491–504. doi:10.1037/a0027901.
• Guerrero, S., Cascado, C., Sausa, M., & Enesco, I. (in revision). My teacher is wrong: preschoolers’ opposition to non-conventional teachers. Submitted to Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
• Harris, P. L. (2012). Trusting what you’re told: how children learn from others. Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674065192.
• Haun, D. B., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Conformity to peer pressure in preschool children. Child Development, 82, 1759–1767. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01666.x.
• Howe, C. (2014). Commentary II: “If you’ve seen it before, then you know”. Physical evidence and children’s trust in testimony. In E. J. Robinson & S. Einav (Eds.), Trust and skepticism: children’s selective learning from testimony (pp. 151–161). Hove: Psychology Press.
• Howe, C., Tolmie, A., Duchak-Tanner, V., & Rattray, C. (2000). Hypothesis testing in science: group consensus and the acquisition of conceptual and procedural knowledge. Learning and Instruction, 10(4), 361–391. doi:10.1016/S0959-4752(00)00004-9.
• Jaswal, V. K., McKercher, D. A., & VanderBorgh, M. (2008). Limitations on reliability: regularity rules in the English plural and past tense. Child Development, 79, 750–760. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01155.x.
• Jaswal, V. K., Croft, A. C., Setia, A. R., & Cole, C. A. (2010). Young children have a specific, highly robust bias to trust testimony. Psychological Science, 21, 1541–1547. doi:10.1177/0956797610383438.
• Kamawar, D., LeFevre, J., Bisanz, J., Fast, L., Skwarchuck, S., Smith-Chant, B., et al. (2010). Knowledge of counting principles: how relevant is order irrelevance? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105, 138–145. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.08.004.
• Koenig, M. A., & Harris, P. L. (2005). Preschoolers mistrust ignorant and inaccurate speakers. Child Development, 76, 1261–1277. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2005.00849.x.
• Koenig, M. A., & Stephens, E. (2014). Characterizing children’s responsiveness to cues of speaker trustworthiness: two proposals. In E. Robinson & S. Einav (Eds.), Trust and skepticism: children’s selective learning from testimony (pp. 13–27). Hove: Psychology Press.
• Koenig, M., Clément, F., & Harris, P. L. (2004). Trust in testimony: children’s use of true and false statements. Psychological Science, 10, 694–698. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00742.x.
• Lago, M. O., Rodríguez, P., Escudero, A., & Dopico, C. (2015). Detection of counting pseudoerrors: what helps children accept them? British Journal of Developmental Psychology: 34, 169–180. doi:10.1111/bjdp.12121.
• Lane, J. D., Harris, P. L., Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (2014). More than meets the eye: young children’s trust in claims that defy their perceptions. Developmental Psychology, 50, 865–871. doi:10.1037/a0034291.
• LeFevre, J., Smith-Chant, B., Fast, L., Skwarchuk, S., Sargla, E., Arnup, J., et al. (2006). What counts as knowing? The development of conceptual and procedural knowledge of counting from kindergarten through Grade 2. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 93, 285–303. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2005.11.002.
• Mills, C. M. (2013). Knowing when to doubt: developing a critical stance when learning from others. Developmental Psychology, 49, 404–418. doi:10.1037/a0029500.
• Morgan, T., Laland, K., & Harris, P. (2015). The development of adaptive conformity in young children: effects of uncertainty and consensus. Developmental Science, 18(4), 511–524. doi:10.1111/desc.12231.
• Olson, D., & Bruner, J. (1996). Folk psychology and folk pedagogy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The handbook of education and human development (pp. 9–27). Oxford: Blackwell.
• Piaget, J. (1947). La psychologie de l’intelligence. Paris: Colin.
• Robinson, E. J., & Einav, S. (Eds.). (2014). Trust and skepticism: children’s selective learning from testimony. Cambridge: Psychology Press.
• Rodríguez, P., Lago, M. O., Enesco, I., & Guerrero, S. (2013). Children’s understanding of counting: kindergarten and primary school children’s detection of errors and pseudoerrors. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 35–46. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2012.08.005.
• Seston, R., & Kelemen, D. (2014). Children’s conformity when acquiring novel conventions: the case of artifacts. Journal of Cognition and Development, 15, 569–583. doi:10.1080/15248372.2013.784973.
• Shaki, S., Fischer, M. H., & Göbel, S. M. (2012). Direction counts: a comparative study of spatially directional counting biases in cultures with different reading directions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 112, 275–281. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2011.12.005.
• Sobel, D. M., & Kushnir, T. (2013). Knowledge matters: how children evaluate the reliability of testimony as a process of rational inference. Psychological Review, 120, 779–797. doi:10.1037/a0034191.