will help them reach their full potential? In an extract from her book
on child psychology, Usha Goswami explains.
Going to school makes dramatic new demands on young children. Rather than occurring as part of everyday experience, learning, reasoning and remembering become active goals in their own right. Successful school performance requires children to develop knowledge about their own information-processing skills: 'How good is my memory?'
Children must also be able to monitor their own cognitive performance. School requires children to develop knowledge about the kinds of cognitive demands made by different classroom tasks. Psychological research shows rapid development in all of these 'meta-cognitive' skills between the ages of three and seven years.
At the same time, children are dealing with the non-trivial requirements of learning to read and write, and learning mathematics. As both reading and mathematics are cultural inventions that have been developed over hundreds of years, it is perhaps unsurprising that children take a while to acquire them successfully.
SUCCESSFUL REMEMBERING
Children develop various kinds of memory, and all are important for learning in school. The types of memory researched by psychologists include semantic memory (our generic, factual knowledge about the world), episodic memory (our ability consciously to retrieve autobiographical happenings from the past), and implicit or procedural memory (such as habits and skills).
Memories that can be brought consciously and deliberately to mind (semantic and episodic memory) are clearly required to benefit from schooling, yet implicit memories, habits and skills can also be important. For example, children aged three to five years who are shown 100 different pictures once, one after the other, can recognise 98 per cent of them in a recall task ('Did you see this one?'). Such experiments suggest that implicit recognition memory (visual recognition memory) is well-developed even in very young children.
Memory research has also shown that, contrary to popular belief, young children seldom invent memories of events that have not occurred. In fact, even very young children can remember distinct (typically unusual or emotionally important) events with great clarity. In one longitudinal study, a four-year-old recalled that when he was two-and-a-half years old, 'I fed my fish too much food and then it died and my mum dumped him in the toilet'. Another child, who was lactose intolerant, remembered that at two-and-a-half, 'Mummy gave me Jonathan's milk and I threw up'.
Scripts
When children are very young, they are focused on learning what psychologists term 'scripts' for routine events. Scripts contain knowledge about the temporal and causal sequence of events in very specific contexts. Examples include 'doing the shopping', 'doing laundry', 'getting ready to go out', and 'eating lunch'.
Scripts are important for organising the experiences and events of everyday life into a predictable framework. These scripts can then be recalled explicitly on demand. Such scripts, or 'general event representations' develop from an early age and their retention is supported when children have regular routines. Regular routines in effect provide multiple learning experiences for understanding everyday life.
Developing basic frameworks for storing, recalling and interpreting particular experiences is fundamental to how our memory systems work, and this is true for adults as well as for children. Scripts are essentially the way in which we structure and represent our memories of reality.
Scripts enable the world to be a secure and relatively predictable place. Knowing what is routine also enables better memory for what is novel. Novel events can be tagged in memory as departures from the expected script. An event like having pudding before the main course at dinner time, because the cooking was taking a long time and everyone was hungry, is very memorable because of its rarity.
Interactions and questions
At the same time, the ways in which parents (and teachers) interact with children have an influence on the development of autobiographical episodic memories. Shared past events that are frequently refreshed via family recollection or discussion in class are (unsurprisingly) retained better than past events that are not refreshed.
At the same time, the ways in which children are questioned about past events has an important effect on how much they remember.
The use of a series of specific questions ('Where did we go? Who did we see? Who else was with us?') is one effective way of consolidating children's memories. This is particularly true if the adult then elaborates upon the information provided by the child.
In one research study, mothers were asked to recall a particular event with their four-year-old child, such as a visit to the zoo. Mothers who asked the same question repeatedly, without elaboration ('What kinds of animals did you see? And what else? And what else?') were less effective in helping their child to store memories than mothers who elaborated their child's information and evaluated it ('Yes, and what was the lion's cage like? Do you remember if we saw tigers?').
When the children were asked to recall these events again when they were aged five and six years, it was the children with more elaborative mothers who showed better recall. Such children remembered significantly more accurate information. One reason this occurs is because children (and adults) construct episodic memories.
Episodic memories are stored partly via rehearsing and recalling an experience (as when adults gossip!). Helping children to recall their experiences in an elaborative way aids the construction process. Therefore, prior knowledge and personal interpretation affect what is remembered.
The language skills of the child themselves are also important. Good language skills improve memory, because children with better language skills are able to construct narratively coherent and extended, temporally organised representations of experienced events.
Finally, talking about the past with one's parents, family, and school friends enables the construction of a personal autobiographic history. This is important for developing a sense of self. Younger children use discussion about the past to strengthen their understanding of their family and of their role within the family.
School-aged children will talk about their autobiographical past to deepen their relationships with their peers. By discussing our past, we are 'sharing ourselves' with others, and cementing our personal relationships. Creating a shared past also makes us members of a community or a social group.
Researchers believe that shared reminiscing of this nature helps children to learn how to be a 'self' in their particular culture and social group. Aspects of self-definition vary across cultures, with the 'self-story' of the individual assigned more importance in Western societies than in Asian cultures, for example.
Usha Goswami FBA is Professor of cognitive developmental neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at Cambridge
This is an edited extract from 'Learning and remembering, reading and number', Chapter 5 of Child Psychology - A Very Short Introduction by Usha Goswami (£7.99, Oxford University Press)
NURSERY WORLD BUSINESS SUMMIT
Professor Usha Goswami will be part of the great line-up of speakers at the Nursery World Business Summit on 11 November. Other speakers include childcare and education minister Sam Gyimah and managing director of Netmums Rimi Atwal.
As author of the hugely influential research paper 'Children's cognitive development and learning', for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, Professor Goswami will speak about the latest research on how children learn.
- Other highlights from the day's programme include the following:
- Ofsted on the newly implemented Common Inspection Framework.
- Spending the Early Years Pupil Premium wisely with the Early Education team.
- Ian Murchie of Barclays on attracting investment.
- The impact of public policy on young children with Giselle Cory of the IPPR.
- Cross-sector panel debate on workforce, qualifications and the recruitment crisis.
Go to www.nurserybusiness-summit.com or contact lucy.allen@markallengroup.com for further information and bookings.
READER OFFER
Drawing on the latest research, Child Psychology - A Very Short Introduction by Usha Goswami (£7.99, Oxford University Press) tracks a child's psychological development from birth to early adolescence, explaining how and why children develop as they do and the impact this has on adulthood.
Themes include secure attachments, language development, reasoning, memory, friendship, and learning about reading and number.
Nursery World readers can enjoy a 30 per cent discount by ordering direct at www.oup.co.uk and using the discount code ATRFLY15 at the checkout. Offer available until 31 December.
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