To a vastly greater degree than any other creature on earth, man is a symbolic being. Our capacity for symbolic thought–the ability to conceptualize the idea that a symbol stands for a reality or "This is that"–is vastly superior to that of any other creatures on the planet. It is what allows us to accumulate knowledge from one generation to another, to develop culture, learn science, etc., etc., etc.
But it doesn’t come on us all at once. We aren’t born with our capacity for symbolic thought all warmed up and ready to cook. It takes a while for us to learn different forms of symbolism, language being one of the first. Visual symbols can take a little longer.
If you have a really young child their visual symbol processing software ain’t all online yet.
This, of course,
MAKES ‘EM REALLY FUN TO TRY SYMBOL-BASED EXPERIMENTS ON.
Among the interesting things scientists who do this are learning are things that have to do with what are the best educational strategies for young children:
A very popular style of book contains a variety of manipulative features designed to encourage children to interact directly with the book itself–flaps that can be lifted to reveal pictures, levers that can be pulled to animate images, and so forth.
Graduate student Cynthia Chiong and I reasoned that these manipulative features might distract children from information presented in the book. Accordingly, we recently used different types of books to teach letters to 30-month-old children. One was a simple, old-fashioned alphabet book, with each letter clearly printed in simple black type accompanied by an appropriate picture–the traditional "A is for apple, B is for boy" type of book. Another book had a variety of manipulative features. The children who had been taught with the plain book subsequently recognized more letters than did those taught with the more complicated book. Presumably, the children could more readily focus their attention with the plain 2-D book, whereas with the other one their attention was drawn to the 3-D activities. Less may be more when it comes to educational books for young children.
Once again, Scientists confirm the obvious. What a waste of time!
The arrogance of people of EVERY generation is that each assumes that they are the pinnacle of intelligence and knowledge and often refuse to acknowledge (and often reject) what has been learned those who preceded us.
This is one of the core problems people have with religion today.
Don’t worry, with MY generation, we’ll do things better. 😉
We have video games to help us.
As a homeschooler, I found the last paragraph in the cited article informational. Sometimes, particularly with the oldest child, a h/ser — okay; I mean ME — in zeal will try to approach a younger child with the methodology more appropriate to the older child. Or even, a younger child wants to do what the older siblings are doing, and mom tries it out on the younger one, in the spirit of teamwork.
Articles like this one are nice antidotes to that sort of thing.
Manipulatives (3-D block letters puzzles) and tactiles (sandpaper letters) are even better than the printed page. Anything that the child can pick up, or touch, will facilitate learning.
Actually, a lot of science consists of testing the blindingly obvious just to find out what all the underlying rules are. You’d be surprised at what sorts of things have turned out to be true for entirely different reasons than folks had thought, or which had weird exceptions. Beyond that, you will have noticed that many people don’t actually pay attention to real life experience. Scientists, on the other hand, like it so much they study it in depth so that it can no longer be denied. (Ideally, anyway.) As Sr. Juana de la Cruz said, Aristotle would’ve been a better scientist if he’d ever had to cook.
Re: too much distraction
This is a big problem with a lot of textbooks today for older kids. I didn’t realize it was possible to have too many colors and pictures on a page until I saw some of my cousins’ Spanish textbooks. You had to hunt hard to find the actual information among all the graphic design features. If the books had been mine, I would have pasted white Post-Its over all the un-useful random photos.
My Spanish textbook from high school was very well-designed, using both pictures and white space to draw attention to the concepts being learned. I guess those graphic designers retired and were replaced by people without taste.
Re: mobile and tactile stuff
That’s good stuff. Just don’t put total reliance on it for all kids. I, for example, always enjoyed building walls with alphabet blocks and tracing sandpaper letters. But mostly I liked them because they were fun activities, as I already knew how to read and write by the time that stuff got introduced to me. I learned how to read by looking at the pages while being read to, and watching Sesame Street. (Well, as soon as I got glasses so that I could see the page and the TV without putting nose to surface.) But even if it’s more fun than helpful, it should at least help kids to keep paying attention.
On the other hand, I had immense trouble figuring out spacial relationships (probably thanks to not being able to see very far for the first year and a half). When I was old enough to rinse off dishes and put them in the dishwasher, I remember wasting huge amounts of water at the sink trying to figure out how the same volume of water could fit into different-shaped things. I understood the whole thing intellectually, but I had no clue of how to guess how much stuff would go in by sight. If I hadn’t had been able to physically handle the objects and the water, I never would have got it.
I finally figured that out, but when I was sixteen and learning how to drive, I didn’t — mostly because nobody believed me when I said there was no way for me to tell where the car was on the road unless I heard the gravel. (That line and hood thing is no help whatsoever. It isn’t real. And besides, then you have to figure it out again with every new car you drive. And let’s not even talk about the uselessness of a console and film.)
A friend and I finally worked that out a couple years ago, mostly by me walking the length and breadth of the car until I was absolutely sure how far everything was from the driver’s seat, and her setting up a turning course with a whole bunch of weighted two-liter pop bottles that I could drive over until I figured it out and was able to extend it to other cars with different measurements. Which took days and days of endless mindless repetition, much like the water pouring.
But I still haven’t gotten over that driver’s ed class where they made me drive out on the highway when I didn’t know how to drive in a parking lot yet. Nor have I figured out how I’m going to do the mindless repetition of merging onto the highway and getting off again, without actually getting myself or someone else killed. Clearly, having somebody sit there and tell me when to move doesn’t work. (Nobody gets killed, but no connection gets made, either. Everything just moves too fast to make any sense. Also the screaming tends to get on my teachers’ nerves.)
This article doesn’t mention the question of cats and dogs’ perception of images. Some animals always seem to think that an image is real; they bark at their own reflection or constantly try to interact with television pictures. Some animals (notoriously, certain wild raccoons) actually seem to enjoy watching certain programs on television. Others seem to ignore images as meaningless. But do the TV viewing pets actually understand, or do they simply have an odd taste for watching the antics of the untouchable animals in the box? I don’t think anybody knows, though I suspect there are studies going on.
Re: manipulatives
I think the paper was talking about using blocks with numbers and plus signs and equals signs, not just blocks.
My mom (who did home instruction) often taught math successfully using objects, but she always made the objects as identical as possible so as not to distract the kids. She had them rubberband bundles of ten pencils.
“Manipulatives (3-D block letters puzzles) and tactiles (sandpaper letters) are even better than the printed page. Anything that the child can pick up, or touch, will facilitate learning.”
Not necessarily. With younger children, the additional properties of the letter symbols often prove distractions to the relevant properties. Yes, the children may be more interested in the objects than in the printed letters, but that interest is not directed towards the properties relevant to serving as an alphabetic symbol.
This is not to say that such objects cannot work, however. I happened to have learned my alphabet from a set of 3D refridgerator magnets. I kept asking my parents what the individual letters were until I had them all memorized. They assumed that I was just playing and was not retaining the names. Would the letters have held my interest if they were not multi-colored 3D physical objects with magnetic properties which I could pick up? Probably not. Did they partially cause me to learn the letters myself? Probably. If someone were to teach me the alphabet, would they be the best objects to use? Probably not.
Interestingly enough, I still have trouble alphabetizing to this day.
What this says to me is that more research, not less, needs to be done in the area of how kids learn. I feel especially strong given that IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; see: http://www.wrightslaw.com/news/idea2002.htm) has been reauthorized and now, more than ever before, educators must provide research-based intervention as a part of the educational procedures. Of course IDEA is of particular interest to special education professionals but there are ramifications in it for education in general.
I feel that the anecdotal wisdom of home schoolers has pragmatic value, but it is no substitute for the findings of research, whatever they may prove to be.
Regarding the use of 3-D and tactiles:
As a former Montessori teacher, I have first hand experience that tactiles are definitely helpful. I had students reading within 6 weeks.
And we should switch to the aviation pronounciation of the alphabet, since it was designed to be understood over static, and thus is much better over the telephone, or spelling out to a clerk.
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