How to Help Young Children Ask Better Questions?

Azzurra Ruggeri; Caren M Walker; Tania Lombrozo; Alison Gopnik

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586819

How to Help Young Children Ask Better Questions?

Front Psychol. 2021 Jan 12:11:586819. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586819. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Azzurra Ruggeri^{1

2}, Caren M Walker³, Tania Lombrozo⁴, Alison Gopnik⁵

Affiliations

¹ MPRG iSearch | Information Search, Ecological and Active Learning Research with Children, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
² TUM School of Education, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
³ Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, United States.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States.
⁵ Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the informativeness of 4- to 6-year-old (N = 125) children's questions using a combined qualitative and quantitative approach. Children were presented with a hierarchical version of the 20-questions game, in which they were given an array of objects that could be organized into three category levels based on shared features. We then tested whether it is possible to scaffold children's question-asking abilities without extensive training. In particular, we supported children's categorization performance by providing the object-related features needed to ask effective constraint-seeking questions. We found that with both age and scaffolding children asked more effective questions, targeting higher category levels and therefore reaching the solution with fewer questions. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these results.

Keywords: information gain; information search; preschoolers; question asking; scaffolding; vocabulary.