Book contents
- The Questioning Child
- The Questioning Child
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Questions about Questions
- 2 Questions in Development
- 3 The Point, the Shrug, and the Question of Clarification
- 4 The Quest for Comprehension and Learning
- 5 Children’s Question-Asking across Cultural Communities
- 6 The Development of Information-Requesting Gestures in Infancy and Their Role in Shaping Learning Outcomes
- 7 Developmental Changes in Question-Asking
- 8 Understanding Developmental and Individual Differences in the Process of Inquiry during the Preschool Years
- 9 “Why Are There Big Squares and Little Squares?”
- 10 Children’s Questions in Social and Cultural Perspective
- 11 Mothers’ Use of Questions and Children’s Learning and Language Development
- 12 Teaching and Learning by Questioning
- 13 Asking “Why?” and “What If?”
- 14 What Makes a Good Question? Towards an Epistemic Classification
- 15 The Questioning Child
- Index
- References
2 - Questions in Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2020
Book contents
- The Questioning Child
- The Questioning Child
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Questions about Questions
- 2 Questions in Development
- 3 The Point, the Shrug, and the Question of Clarification
- 4 The Quest for Comprehension and Learning
- 5 Children’s Question-Asking across Cultural Communities
- 6 The Development of Information-Requesting Gestures in Infancy and Their Role in Shaping Learning Outcomes
- 7 Developmental Changes in Question-Asking
- 8 Understanding Developmental and Individual Differences in the Process of Inquiry during the Preschool Years
- 9 “Why Are There Big Squares and Little Squares?”
- 10 Children’s Questions in Social and Cultural Perspective
- 11 Mothers’ Use of Questions and Children’s Learning and Language Development
- 12 Teaching and Learning by Questioning
- 13 Asking “Why?” and “What If?”
- 14 What Makes a Good Question? Towards an Epistemic Classification
- 15 The Questioning Child
- Index
- References
Summary
Everyone will likely acknowledge that attitudes such as curiosity and interest are vitally important for learning, and that young children ask so many questions because they are intensely curious and interested in the world around them. But the nature of these questioning attitudes themselves is poorly understood. Indeed, many have a mistaken view of them – or so I will claim. In consequence, many are led to give mistaken accounts of the cognitive processes that underlie children’s asking and answering of questions, too. This matters, both for our understanding of childhood development generally and for designing interventions that are intended to help children learn. This chapter has two main goals. One is to offer a fresh set of conceptual resources for those wanting to understand childhood development – specifically, the likely existence from infancy of a set of first–order, non–metacognitive, questioning attitudes. The second is to suggest that the early question–asking and question–answering behavior of infants and toddlers is best understood as expressive of such attitudes, rather than providing evidence of early metacognition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Questioning ChildInsights from Psychology and Education, pp. 6 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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