Child

Child Development, January/February 2000, Volume 71, Number 1, Pages 26Ð35

The Rebirth of Children’s Learning

Robert S. Siegler

Learning is a central part of children´s lives, but the study of learning is a rather peripheral part of the field of cognitive development. Fortunately, this situation is starting to change; recent theoretical and methodological advances have sparked renewedinterest in children´s learning. This renewed interest has already yielded a set of consistent and interesting findings regarding how children learn, as well as intriguing proposals regarding the mechanisms that underlie the learning. Increasing our focus on children´s learning promises to yield practical benefits as well as a more exciting field of cognitive development.

INTRODUCTION

At onetime, children´s learning was the central topic in developmental psychology. This has not been the case for many years, however. With the cognitive revolution in adult experimental psychology and the rise of Piaget´s theory within developmental psychology, the emphasis shifted
from learning to thinking. This shift laid the foundation for a rich and vibrant field of cognitive development. Thegains, however, came at a cost. We now know quite a bit about children´s thinking at different ages, but we know little about how they get from here to there. In a sense, we threw out the baby of learning with the bath water of associationism.

The movement away from studying children´s learning reflected more than a shift in interest; it also reflected an assumption that development and learningare fundamentally different processes. Piaget frequently distinguished between development, by which he meant the active construction of knowledge, and learning, by which he meant the passive formation of associations. Active developmental processes were of interest; passive learning processes were not. This distinction was valuable in focusing attention on children´s efforts to make sense of theworld and in exposing hidden assumptions that had shaped previous research on children´s learning. However, Piaget´s stance had the unfortunate side effect of producing skepticism about the importance of any kind of learning for development. This led to a drastic decline in studies of children´s learning. As Stevenson (1983) commented:

By the mid-1970s, articles on children´s learning dwindled toa fraction of the number that had been published in the previous decade, and by 1980, it was necessary to search with diligence to uncover any articles at all. . . . The discussion of children´s learning had been displaced by a newfound interest in cognitive development (p. 213).

Prominent successors to Piaget´s theory, in particular neonativist and theory-theory approaches, also have focusedon children´s thinking, largely to the exclusion of their learning. The research that they have inspired has expanded our understanding of development by revealing substantial, domain-specific, cognitive capabilities that children possess from early in life and by demonstrating the key roles of causal connections, often mediated by unobservable constructs,
in these early understandings. LikePiaget´s theory, however, they have told us little about how children come to have these understandings.

It is no accident that recent theories have focused more on the ways children typically think at particular ages than on the processes by which they learn to think in more advanced ways. Intellectually, it makes sense to map out landmarks within the developmental progression before trying tospecify the mechanisms by which children move from here to there. Logistic factors militate in the same direction; simply put, it is easier to determine what children know at different ages than to determine how they acquire the knowledge. Research approaches also create their own momentum; the great recent progress in understanding certain topics that have been in vogue, such as understanding of...