How Children Learn

The chapter on How Children Learn has been very interesting to read, since I have a three year old daughter named Mariel. For years psychologists thought that a newborn’s mind was like a blank slate and experiences were impressed progressively. Theoretical developments by Piaget and Vigotsky brought to light the idea of considering infants as active learners. Children are able to acquire strategies for understanding, remembering and solving problems from the moment they are born.

Developmental psychology has contributed to understanding the human mind as a result of early learning research. By using non-nutritive sucking, habituation and visual expectation methods, experimenters have been able to ask infants what they know. When my daughter was a few months old, we bought a Baby Einstein DVD and played it daily. It is true; children habituate over a period of time. The novelty of other DVDs that featured new shapes, colors and sounds re-stimulated her interest.

Infants develop early competencies in various privileged domains or categories. In the physical concepts, it has been demonstrated that between 3-6 months of age, infants have useful knowledge of the physical world. They understand how inanimate objects move and stand still. In the biological causality category, infants also know that animate objects have the potential to move on their own because they have life.

Two additional privileged domains are number and language. Infants process information that represents numbers at an abstract level. As children grow, they form specific knowledge of number concepts which may lead to difficulties understanding that ¼ is less than ½. Children also possess mechanisms for learning languages. Infants look at the lips and pay attention to intonation and rhythm of the person speaking. Mariel is attending a Pre-K school and doesn’t know English. However, the language-using environment, shared social and situational contexts are setting into motion her English language acquisition.

I am surprised at how Mariel wants to learn things on her own, even if she has to re-do everything that I have done to help her. Through effort and will, children can learn anything. In addition, children can learn to use strategies to improve their memory performance by chunking information and using guided metacognition.

Traditional school curricula are beginning to be influenced by the theory of Multiple Intelligences. Teachers are now able to provide different approaches in their lessons. Schools face the challenge of building on children’s motivation to ensure adequate learning through social interactions. In addition, by telling and reading stories adults nurture an impetus to the growth of language skills. Furthermore, within cultural communities there are differences in communication styles that affect the way adults communicate with children. The school teachers have a great responsibility in developing a two-way path in order to be sensitive to problems of cultural mismatches.

Learning for children takes place as a natural process. At home, adult-child relationships form a foundation for children's interaction with others outside of the home. It is through discovery and games that they are able to acquire fundamental skills that prepare them for school.