Step Aside - Putting Little Brains to Work
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Step Aside
Putting Little Brains to Work
Evidence that toddlers learn new words more easily, and retain them longer, when they are allowed to figure out the meaning themselves could color the future of teaching. Johns Hopkins psychology student Meredith Brinster’s study of how young children learn to attach the names of objects to the objects themselves determined that, as a learning strategy, independently inferring word meaning is more effective for a child than direct instruction, in which an adult points to and names an unfamiliar object. Brinster explains that with the inference method the toddler uses reason (such as a process of elimination) to mentally fasten an unfamiliar word to an unfamiliar object. Evidently, it sticks.
Source: Johns Hopkins University, March 2007
