Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 186, May 2019, Pages 82-94
Cognition

Original Articles
Memory enhancements from active control of learning emerge across development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.01.010Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper investigates whether active control of study leads to enhanced learning in 5- to 11-year-old children. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants played a simple memory game with the instruction to try to remember and later recognize a set of 64 objects. In Experiment 3, the goal was to learn the French names for the same objects. For half of the materials presented, participants could decide the order and pacing of study (Active condition). For the other half, they passively observed the study decisions of a previous participant (Yoked condition). Recognition memory was more accurate for objects studied in the active as compared to the yoked condition. However, the active learning advantage was relatively small among 5-year-olds and increased with age, becoming comparable to adults’ by age 8. Our results show that the ability to actively control study develops during early childhood and results in memory benefits that last over a week-long delay. We discuss possible interpretations for the observed developmental change, as well as the implications of these results for educational implementations.

Introduction

Educators frequently argue that self-directed, active learning situations foster better and deeper learning (Bruner et al., 1976, Kuhn and Kaplan, 2000, Montessori, 1912/1964, Piaget, 1930). Although this idea involves a number of interrelated issues, like motivation or deeper processing, many argue that giving students some degree of independent, volitional control during learning is itself beneficial (Chi, 2009, Gureckis and Markant, 2012, Markant et al., 2016). An important role for experimental psychology is to assess if and how these bedrock educational principles align with what we know about the basic mechanisms of learning and memory. Indeed, recent studies with adults have shown that minimal forms of volitional control (specifically, allowing learners to select the order and pacing of study) lead to memory improvements compared to situations lacking this control (Harman et al., 1999, Voss, Galvan, et al., 2011, Voss, Gonsalves, et al., 2011, Voss, Warren, et al., 2011, Liu et al., 2007, Markant et al., 2014, Meijer and Van der Lubbe, 2011, Plancher et al., 2013).

While interesting, it is unclear how these adult findings might inform educational policies that seek to help developing learners. Self-directed learning requires the coordination of a range of cognitive processes, including decision making, exploration, metacognition, attention, and memory, all of which are subject to critical developmental changes (Kachergis, Rhodes, & Gureckis, 2017). In light of this, one possibility is that only mature learners can effectively leverage self-directed learning. This paper presents a series of experiments designed to trace the emergence and developmental trajectory of self-directed learning as a successful learning modality for children.

Earlier work suggested that children do not select the most informative evidence to explore until late primary school age (Chen and Klahr, 1999, Kuhn and Brannock, 1977). However, more recent research suggests that children are effective and adaptive active learners from a very early age (Ruggeri, Sim, & Xu, 2017), although the informativeness of their learning strategies undergoes a large developmental change from age 4 to adulthood (see Ruggeri and Feufel, 2015, Ruggeri and Lombrozo, 2015, Ruggeri et al., 2016). It is not yet fully understood which factors drive developmental changes in active learning effectiveness, how they interact with each other, or how their relative importance changes at different developmental stages. Potential factors include verbal skills, conceptual knowledge, executive functions, formal education, and socioeconomic status (SES). In particular, the effectiveness of active learning strategies is expected to heavily depend on children’s metacognitive abilities. Metamemory (the ability to introspect on the accuracy of one’s memories) has been shown to impact the implementation of appropriate memory strategies in both adults (Hutchens et al., 2012) and children (Geurten et al., 2015, Grammer et al., 2011). Metamemory monitoring improves considerably over the elementary school years (Roebers, 2017), with older children’s confidence judgments showing greater discrimination between accurate and inaccurate memories than younger children’s (Fandakova et al., 2013, Ghetti et al., 2009, Ghetti et al., 2011). Previous work also suggests that the ability to allocate study time based on the difficulty or familiarity of the materials develops across childhood (Metcalfe, 2002, Metcalfe and Finn, 2013a). For example, early studies found that older (10- and 12-year-olds), but not younger children (6- and 8-year-olds) spent significantly more time learning unrelated, difficult picture pairs (e.g., frog-book) than related, easy pairs (e.g., bat-ball; Dufresne and Kobasigawa, 1988, Dufresne and Kobasigawa, 1989). Along the same lines, Lockl and Schneider (2003) found that both first and third graders were able to differentiate between easy and difficult picture pairs, but only third graders adjusted their study time accordingly.

These work suggests that the ability to actively organize study behavior strategically and effectively emerges over early childhood, and develops across the lifespan. However, a more relevant question for educators is not whether children are sensitive or aware of their own memory abilities, but whether allowing children to control their own learning process would lead to learning advantages. To this end, merely studying the development of metamemory skills and strategies is not enough. Instead, it is crucial to investigate whether and how active control as a learning modality is beneficial for children as compared to more passive forms of instruction.

Previous research with adults has investigated the benefits of active learning by using memory tasks. For example, Voss and colleagues (Voss, Galvan, et al., 2011, Voss, Gonsalves, et al., 2011, Voss, Warren, et al., 2011) presented adult participants with a set of objects arranged on a grid, with only one object visible at a time through a moving window, and asked them to memorize as many objects as possible. Participants alternated between active study blocks, in which they controlled the study sequence and timing by deciding how to move the window, and “yoked” study blocks, in which they observed the study sequence that a previous participant had generated in an active study block. By matching the content experienced during study across conditions, yoked designs isolate the effects of active control on learning and memory. These studies have found robust benefits of active control of study on object recognition, meaning that participants were more accurate at recognizing objects that had been actively studied as compared to those studied in the yoked condition. This advantage has been found to persist a week after the initial study session (Voss, Gonsalves, et al., 2011). Similar results have been obtained with a variety of related tasks and materials (Harman et al., 1999, Liu et al., 2007, Markant et al., 2014, Meijer and Van der Lubbe, 2011, Plancher et al., 2013), and with both younger and older adults (Brandstatt & Voss, 2014).

These studies further revealed that the benefits of active study depended on how participants explored the objects. Voss, Galvan, et al. (2011) found that objects studied for longer durations were more likely to be recognized in the active, but not in the yoked, condition (although yoked observers seem to benefit from additional study time when cued to the locations of new stimuli, see Markant et al., 2014). Moreover, revisiting objects within a short period of time also led to better memory performance among younger adults (Brandstatt and Voss, 2014, Voss, Galvan, et al., 2011), but only following active study. Interestingly, the same search pattern was less common among older adults and did not lead to the benefits from active study observed in younger adults (Brandstatt & Voss, 2014). With this type of learning task, it is possible to investigate the link between the search strategies generated during active study (including the sequencing of items and allocation of study time) and the resulting benefits over passive observation of the same information.

A few recent studies have shown that active control can facilitate learning in children as well. For example, Sim, Tanner, Alpert, and Xu (2015) found that 7-year-olds learned categorical rules more effectively when they were free to decide what information to gather, as compared to yoked observations. Active control has also been shown to lead to memory improvements for children in spatial navigation tasks (Feldman and Acredolo, 1979, McComas et al., 1997, Poag et al., 1983) and when learning novel object-word pairings (Partridge, Mcgovern, Yung, & Kidd, 2015). Although these results suggest that active control would enhance children’s episodic memory, it is an open question at what age this benefit would emerge and how it would develop across childhood. Do these advantages reflect developmental progress along the way to adult competence, or a robust and universal advantage of self-directed learning?

The present paper compares the effects of active and yoked study on 5- to 11-year-old children’s learning. Experiment 1 replicates the design from previous adult studies (Markant et al., 2014, Voss, Gonsalves, et al., 2011). Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 replicate and extend the results from Experiment 1, exploring the cognitive and metacognitive factors that might impact the benefit of active control of study. In particular, Experiment 2 investigates the effect of differential pre-exposure on children’s studying strategies (mimicing the easy-hard manipulations of the metamemory literature). Experiment 3 explores the effect of active study in a paired associate learning task in which children had to learn the French names for the same objects used in Experiments 1 and 2, additionally controlling for children’s working memory as a possible moderator for the advantage of active learning.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants in Experiment 1 were 51 5- to 8-year-old children (24 female, Mage=82.59 months; SD=13.72 months; range: 60 to 105 months) tested in the laboratory and recruited from Berkeley, California and surrounding communities. Nine participants (18%) did not return for the retest session, but the data from their first test session were included in the analyses. The mean interval between first and second sessions was 8.3days (SD=2.63 days; range: 5 to 15 days). Sample size was determined

Experiment 2

In Experiment 2 we replicate and extend Experiment 1 in two significant ways. First, we introduce a pre-exposure manipulation to investigate whether the advantage of active control for memory depends on the efficacy of children’s metamemory. At the beginning of each block, some objects were displayed on the screen for a longer time as compared to others, before disappearing under the occluders. If children recognize that they had less time to study the short-exposure objects, they may

Experiment 3

In Experiment 3, we examine the benefits of active control in a task similar to that used in Experiments 1 and 2, but modified to be more similar to the learning situations children encounter in school. Instead of being tasked with simply remembering a set of objects, children had to learn the French names of the same objects given in Experiments 1 and 2. In addition, in Experiment 3, we explore how the benefit of active learning is linked to the development of other cognitive resources such as

General discussion

The present experiments investigated whether active control over study leads to advantages in memory encoding and learning across childhood. We found that episodic memory (Experiments 1 and 2) and word learning (Experiment 3) is more accurate for objects/labels studied in an active as compared to a yoked condition, where participants merely observed the active study pattern of a previous participant. This comparison carefully controls for content and timing of study materials, isolating the

Author contributions

All authors developed the study concept and contributed to the study design. D. Markant developed the software used for testing. Testing and data collection were performed by A. Ruggeri and M. Bretzke. D. Markant performed the data analysis. All authors interpreted the results. A. Ruggeri drafted the manuscript, and the other authors provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Acknowledgments

We thank Celina Vicuna, Sana Alimohamed, Lesley Blair Winchester, Mandana Mostofi, Sarah De La Vega, Minh-Thy Nguyen, Gregor Caregnato, and Chiara Cunzolo for assistance in data collection and coding, as well as Susana Herrera and Kritika Shrestha for drawing and coloring the stimuli. This research was supported by Grant No. 1640816 from the National Science Foundation to FX, by Grant No. BCS- 1255538 from the National Science Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation “Varieties of

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