The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery.

By E. Bonawitz, Patrick Shafto, Hyowon Gweon, Noah D. Goodman, Laura Schulz. 2011

662 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motivated by computational analyses, we look at how teaching affects exploration and discovery. In Experiment 1, we investigated children’s exploratory play after an adult pedagogically demonstrated a function of a toy, after an interrupted pedagogical demonstration, after a naïve adult demonstrated the function, and at baseline. Preschoolers in the pedagogical condition focused almost exclusively on the target function; by contrast, children in the other conditions explored broadly. In Experiment 2, we show that children restrict their exploration both after direct instruction to themselves and after overhearing direct instruction given to another child; they do not show this constraint after observing direct instruction given to an adult or after observing a non-pedagogical intentional action. We discuss these findings as the result of rational inductive biases. In pedagogical contexts, a teacher’s failure to provide evidence for additional functions provides evidence for their absence; such contexts generalize from child to child (because children are likely to have comparable states of knowledge) but not from adult to child. Thus, pedagogy promotes efficient learning but at a cost: children are less likely to perform potentially irrelevant actions but also less likely to discover novel information.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Statistics and Probability

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Citations in the corpus

Putting Education in “Educational” Apps (2015, background): “The double-edged sword of a strict and nonresponsive direct instruction format is that it limits exploration and may prevent children from learning beyond exactly what they are taught (Alfieri et al., 2011; Bonawitz et al., 2011).”
How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Social and Gender Norms? A Meta-Ethnographic Review (2018, background): “However, though teaching provides the quickest avenue for learning, teaching may also hinder autonomous exploration (Bonawitz et al., 2009, 2011).”
The impact of pretend play on children's development: a review of the evidence. (2013, background): “…see Berlyne, 1960; Hutt et al., 1989, p. 11) with specially designed puzzle toys known to do interesting things can lead to discovering solutions that are more efficient than a single inefficient solution that was taught (Bonawitz et al., 2011; Buchsbaum, Gopnik, Griffiths, & Shafto, 2011).”
The Ontogeny of Cultural Learning. (2016, background): “As noted earlier, research conducted in the United States has demonstrated that deliberate pedagogy is effective in limiting exploration of novel objects in childhood (Bonawitz et al., 2011). Is this funneling effect of pedagogy an index of children’s spontaneous conclusions about the exhaustiveness”
The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online (2019, background): “From a very early age, humans have an automatic tendency to infer what others are trying to communicate upon receiving feedback (Bonawitz et al., 2011; Sage & Baldwin, 2011) and use this information to inform future behaviors (Egyed, Király, & Gergely, 2013).”
Explanation-seeking curiosity in childhood (2020, neutral): “However, relying on knowledgeable others can also suppress exploration — direct pedagogy decreases preschoolers’ exploration and learning of non-target information [50], and preschoolers (though not elementary schoolers) forgo exploration of counterintuitive claims offered by reliable sources [51].”
Guided Play: Where Curricular Goals Meet a Playful Pedagogy (2013, background): “Interestingly, the converse also seems to be true: The use of direct instruction in the face of a novel toy or problem can limit exploration and learning (Bonawitz et al., 2011).”
Learning From Others (2012, neutral): “The second scenario, taken from Bonawitz et al. (2011), we call “Tim’s Toy.””
Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms and the theory theory (2012, neutral): “Even infants make these inferences (Gweon, Tenenbaum, & Schulz, 2010; Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007).”
The Naïve Utility Calculus: Computational Principles Underlying Commonsense Psychology. (2016, background): “Consistent with this expectation, children assume that teachers share all relevant information in simple domains [86], and when a teacher demonstrates only one of many functions of a toy, children rate the teacher poorly and mistrust his subsequent teaching [87].”
Investigating Human Priors for Playing Video Games (2018, background): “However, being equipped with strong prior knowledge can sometimes lead to constrained exploration that might not be optimal in all environments (Bonawitz et al., 2011; Lucas et al., 2014).”