Does Active Experience Support Children's Learning from Instruction?

From early in life, young children learn conventional information, including artifact uses and formal systems like mathematics. Children’s active experience has long been considered beneficial for learning (Piaget, 1953). However, for some types of learning, children require instruction from an expert; instruction transmits information efficiently and may provide children with all the information they need to learn (Kirschner et al., 2006). When children receive instruction, does active experience improve their learning? Children may engage actively while they are instructed, or children may actively explore new material before or after instruction. Active experience can involve several features, including physical engagement with materials as well as agency, which includes cognitive activities such as decision-making and hypothesis generation. These aspects of experience could, in turn, have implications for several aspects of learning, including mastery of taught information, generalization of learned rules or regularities to new problems, and long-term memory for the taught material. In this dissertation, I report six preregistered experiments that examine whether and how active experience supports children’s learning of conventional information in instructed contexts. In Chapter 2, I present two experiments investigating an early case of instructed learning, asking whether active engagement during instruction enhances toddlers’ learning about assembling simple toys. In a series of four experiments in Chapters 3 and 4, I turn my attention to older children’s, and adults’, learning of a novel two-factor rule in a problem-solving game, asking whether active exploration before or after instruction improves learning. I find that active experience does not universally enhance learning. In some cases, however, active experience improved particular learning outcomes: Guided active experience supported children’s long-term memory for taught information (Chapter 2) and active experience following instruction improved children’s generalization of learned rules to new contexts (Chapters 3 and 4)