2026/04/24 by Elizabeth Lapidow, Amberley R Stein, Giovanni Thomas +1 · 1 voice
Psychology · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Educational Strategies and Epistemologies #Reading and Literacy Development
paper · doi:10.1093/chidev/aacag087
Question asking is essential for learning in childhood. But options for possible questions are nearly infinite. We investigate whether causal knowledge might serve as a guiding constraint. Children (5-7 years old, N = 144, 51% female, 49% White, data collected 2022-2024) heard about an event and asked questions to try to identify its cause. Even the youngest children readily deployed their real-world causal knowledge to select better questions (Experiment 1) and generate their own questions from scratch (Experiment 2). Children's grasp of efficient question-asking improved with age. This study provides initial evidence that young learners successfully employ conceptual knowledge to ask good questions within a defined information search problem, and provides insight into how learners arrive at relevant ideas given nearly infinite possibilities.