October 7, 2022

7 October is Children’s Day in Singapore. Children learn from others not only through direct experiences but also verbal testimony. Verbal testimony takes place in a human information-sharing system, requiring children to consume given information and produce information for others, the latter of which is teaching. Western studies have shown that children engaging in teaching activities tend to use more sophisticated verbal teaching strategies (e.g., making contrasts) if they are better at inferring their learners’ knowledge states from learners’ mistakes.

In ‘Linking young children’s teaching to their reasoning of mental states: Evidence from Singapore’ (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2021), Ms Nina Ni Ye (NUS Psychology), Professor Gail D Heyman (University of California, San Diego), and Assistant Professor Xiao Pan Ding (NUS Psychology) investigated links between children’s teaching abilities and their developing theory of mind (ToM) abilities in a non-Western sample. They found that both false belief understanding and the ability to make mental state inferences in a teaching context were associated with effective teaching.

The researchers engaged 49 four- to six-year-old Singaporean children in an experiment. The children were to teach learners how to play a game, the goal of which was to strategically hide stickers in order to win prizes. Effective teaching requires the participants to adjust their teaching strategies based on cues about learners’ knowledge level and information about their opponents. The researchers examined children’s teaching ability according to whether they engaged in elaborative teaching strategies and adjusted them according to cues about the knowledge of the learner. The study also included detailed measures of how the children understood their own and others’ mental states.

The researchers found that the ability to apply teaching-specific mental state inferences in a teaching context was associated with more elaborative teaching strategies, even after controlling for children’s age and language ability. Moreover, links between more general explicit ToM capacities and teaching ability existed only in relation to false belief understanding (one type of ToM capacity). Specifically, false belief understanding was associated with elaborative teaching strategy. The location false belief task (whether children can infer that another person does not know the location of the sticker that the children know), but not the contents false belief task (whether children can infer that another person does not know something that the children know), was associated with children’s teaching ability. The researchers postulated that this was because the location false belief task required children to trace the mental states of different people, whereas the contents false belief task merely required a recognition of knowledge differences between oneself and another person.

Finally, the researchers pointed out that more research is needed to determine whether the findings will vary according to cultural differences. Future work should also address the development of nonverbal cues in teaching such as eye gaze. There could also be other earlier developing ToM skills that contribute to children’s capacity to teach others.

Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105175