Selective Attention to Lesson-Relevant Contextual Information Promotes 3- to 5-Year-Old Children's Learning

Autor/inn/en	King, Jill; Markant, Julie
Titel	Selective Attention to Lesson-Relevant Contextual Information Promotes 3- to 5-Year-Old Children's Learning
Quelle	In: Developmental Science, 25 (2022) 4, (15 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (King, Jill)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1467-7687
DOI	10.1111/desc.13237
Schlagwörter	Preschool Children; Visual Aids; Attention; Eye Movements; Video Technology; Science Instruction; Early Childhood Education + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Pre-school age; Preschool age; Child; Children; Pre-school education; Preschool education; Vorschulalter; Kind; Kinder; Vorschulkind; Vorschulkinder; Vorschulerziehung; Vorschule; Anschauungsmaterial; Aufmerksamkeit; Augenbewegung; Teaching of science; Science education; Natural sciences Lessons; Naturwissenschaftlicher Unterricht; Early childhood; Education; Frühkindliche Bildung; Frühpädagogik
Abstract	Attending to distracting or competing information is typically considered detrimental to learning, but the presence of competing information can also facilitate learning when it is relevant to ongoing task goals. Educational settings often contain contextual elements such as classroom decorations or visual aids to enhance student learning. Despite this, most research examining effects of contextual information on children's learning has only utilized lesson-irrelevant stimuli. While this research has shown that increased looking to task-irrelevant information hinders learning, the extent to which looking to lesson-relevant information can benefit children's learning is unknown. We addressed this question by examining 3- to 5-year-old children's attention to and learning from lesson-relevant contextual information. We recorded children's eye movements as they viewed video science lessons while lesson-relevant and -irrelevant images appeared in the periphery. We assessed learning based on improvements in content knowledge following the video lessons and separately measured selective attention skills using the Track-It task. Children overall spent more time looking at lesson-relevant versus -irrelevant images, and those with more initial knowledge of the lesson topics or more advanced selective attention skills showed increased preferential looking to the relevant images. This increased preferential looking to lesson-relevant images related to more effective learning during trials in which both relevant and irrelevant images were present. These results suggest that the effects of competing contextual information on early learning depend on the relationship between information content and task goals, as well as children's ability to actively select task-relevant information from their environment. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01