CAREER: A Rational Analysis of How Teachers' Examples Constrain Learning and Inference

研究表明，儿童和成人都能区分教学情境和非教学情境；教学推理凌驾于事实信息之上，阻碍儿童的发现学习；教学示范导致本科生的推理模式可预测。本研究旨在探讨社会-教学情境对学龄前学生和本科生学习的影响程度。该项目将对比向知识渊博的老师学习和向天真的老师学习，以探索在这些情况下如何产生不同的推论，即使提供了完全相同的例子。首席研究员建议在六项基于实验室的研究中使用社会教学学习的贝叶斯模型来检验教学情境影响学习者以可操纵和可预测的方式从数据中得出的推论的主要假设。对于这六项实验研究中的每一项，研究人员将招募大约50名学龄前儿童或本科生，并将他们随机分配到实验室环境中的两种条件之一。该研究将探索如何从一组示例中得出推论，同时操纵这些示例的生成方式（例如，从知识渊博的教师vs.随机）。该项目的目标是更多地了解社会教学环境何时、为何以及如何影响学习，为理解儿童和成人传播和积累知识的能力提供理论框架。

Research has shown that both children and adults differentiate between pedagogical and non-pedagogical situations, that pedagogical inferences override factual information and impede discovery learning in children, and that pedagogical demonstrations lead to predictable patterns of inferences in undergraduates. The purpose of this CAREER project is to explore the extent to which social-pedagogical context affects learning with preschool students and undergraduates. The project will contrast learning from a knowledgeable teacher with learning from a naive teacher, to explore how different inferences result from these situations, even when the exact same examples are provided.The principal investigator proposes to use a Bayesian model of social-pedagogical learning across six laboratory-based studies to test the main hypothesis that pedagogical situations affect the inferences that learners draw from data in ways that are manipulable and predictable. For each of the six experimental studies the researcher will recruit approximately 50 preschoolers or undergraduates and randomly assign them to one of two conditions in a laboratory setting. The research will explore how inferences are drawn from a set of examples while manipulating how those examples are generated (e.g., from a knowledgeable teacher vs. at random). The goal of the project is to learn more about when, why, and how social-pedagogical context affects learning to inform a theoretical framework for understanding children and adult abilities to transmit and accumulate knowledge.