ERIC Number: EJ1372295
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023-Mar
Pages: 31
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0364-0213
EISSN: EISSN-1551-6709
Available Date: N/A
When Naïve Pedagogy Breaks Down: Adults Rationally Decide How to Teach, but Misrepresent Learners' Beliefs
Aboody, Rosie; Velez-Ginorio, Joey; Santos, Laurie R.; Jara-Ettinger, Julian
Cognitive Science, v47 n3 e13257 Mar 2023
From early in childhood, humans exhibit sophisticated intuitions about how to share knowledge efficiently in simple controlled studies. Yet, untrained adults often fail to teach effectively in real-world situations. Here, we explored what causes adults to struggle in informal pedagogical exchanges. In Experiment 1, we first showed evidence of this effect, finding that adult participants failed to communicate their knowledge to naïve learners in a simple teaching task, despite reporting high confidence that they taught effectively. Using a computational model of rational teaching, we found that adults assigned to our teaching condition provided highly informative examples but failed to teach effectively because their examples were tailored to learners who were only considering a small set of possible explanations. In Experiment 2, we then found experimental evidence for this possibility, showing that knowledgeable participants systematically misunderstand the beliefs of naïve participants. Specifically, knowledgeable participants assumed naïve agents would primarily consider hypotheses close to the correct one. Finally, in Experiment 3, we aligned learners' beliefs to knowledgeable agents' expectations and showed learners the same examples selected by participants assigned to teach in Experiment 1. We found that these same examples were significantly more informative once learners' hypothesis spaces were constrained to match teachers' expectations. Our findings show that, in informal settings, adult pedagogical failures result from an inaccurate representation of what naïve learners believe is plausible and not an inability to select informative data in a rational way.
Descriptors: Teaching Methods, Student Attitudes, Adults, Task Analysis, Communication Problems, Teacher Effectiveness, Misconceptions, Teacher Student Relationship, Expectation, Decision Making
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.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/pg9zy/
Author Affiliations: N/A