Help Evaluate the Discovery Center
Learning Through Play
It is widely believed that children learn by playing, but if you observe children’s play activities, you may notice that the process of ‘playing’ is inherently unsystematic. This contradiction has made the question of how children learn during play of particular interest to parents, teachers and researchers. To find out what play is all about, cognitive scientists have developed and are testing theories about how children might learn through play.
Theory of Mind
How do children's explanations affect their beliefs about the world?
This study examines how children's explanations may help them learn about other people's minds. We use a "false belief task", which explores whether children understand that a person can hold a belief about the world that is not true.
False belief tasks are presented as stories. A character hides her toy in one location and leaves. While she is away, another character moves the toy to a new location. When asked where the first character will look for her toy upon returning, children under four predict the new location, even though the character could not know that the toy moved. Children four and older who understand "false belief" predict that the character will look in her original hiding place.
Previous research has shown that explaining surprising evidence may help children learn false belief understanding. Our study aims to figure out why this helps, by reading children false-belief stories that show the character searching in the new location.
If explanations help children question their beliefs, then as children read more stories they should begin to demonstrate false belief understanding. In contrast, if explanations merely help children pay closer attention, then children should be less likely to demonstrate false belief understanding.
This study will help us understand not only the role of explanations in children's causal learning, but also how educators might most effectively use explanations to help children learn.
Learn about other research related to Learning Through Play.
This research is conducted by the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT
Try it at the Museum
Store food like a chipmunk!
Pretend to be a chipmunk with your child, using the chipmunk puppets and acorns in the chipmunk burrow in the Discovery Center. Have one chipmunk hide an acorn and a second chipmunk uncover the hidden acorn and store it somewhere else.
Where does your child think the first chipmunk will look for his acorn when returning to eat it?
If you play this game each time you visit the Discovery Center, does your child begin to understand false belief and base his/her prediction on the perspective of the chipmunk whose acorn was moved?
Try it at Home
Hide and Seek
Children love to play "hide-and-seek", and they often have favorite "hiding spots" that they use again and again. The next time your child plays hide-and-seek, watch where your child and his/her friends tend to hide. Then, join in on the fun and hide in a spot that your child would not normally use.
Does your child take on the adults' perspective in order to figure out what spaces would be big enough for a grownup to hide in, or does your child only look for you in his/her favorite hiding spots?
The Living Laboratory initiative is made possible through support from the National Science Foundation.