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

研究表明，儿童和成人都区分了教学情境和非教学情境，教学推理凌驾于事实信息之上，阻碍了儿童的发现学习，教学示范导致本科生的推理模式可预测。这一职业项目的目的是探索社会教学环境对学龄前儿童和本科生学习的影响程度。该项目将对比从知识渊博的老师那里学习和从天真的老师那里学习，以探索如何在提供完全相同的例子的情况下产生不同的推论。主要研究人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主要假设，即教学情境以可操纵和可预测的方式影响学习者从数据中得出的推论。对于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，并在实验室环境中随机将他们分配到两种条件中的一种。这项研究将探索如何从一组例子中得出推论，同时操纵这些例子是如何产生的(例如，从知识渊博的老师那里与随机产生的)。该项目的目标是更多地了解社会教学环境何时、为什么以及如何影响学习，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.