Chapter 18: Preschoolers’ Selective Learning From Adults: Lessons for Research Methods in Early Childhood Education

One of the missions in early childhood education is to provide young children with an opportunity to learn new epistemic and social information— and to prepare young children with the skills needed for a lifetime of successful learning. As such, an important task for children during the early childhood years is to determine how to acquire knowledge in an accurate and efficient manner. When children are learning new information about the world, they have two sources available to them: they can rely on their own, first-hand observations, or they can rely on the information provided by other people. In many educational situations, children have access to both types of information, such as in a lesson on gravity that allows young children to both experience the effects of gravity on falling objects and to hear scientific information about gravity from the classroom teacher, a trusted source. But there are many instances where the information they have about the world can only be learned from others. In those instances, do children believe everything they see and hear?