Train children's reporting by directing attention to essential details and teaching a critical attitude toward one's own report¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 3 claims (3 for) · 1 study (1 review), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 3 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article recommends training in giving reports, which it argues is possible only by directing the child's attention to the details adults consider essential, thereby accelerating the developmental transformation of the child's distribution of attention. Suggested means include using report-experiments as memory instruction added to observation instruction, describing objects after they are taken away, and calling attention to essential details during perception itself. By calling attention to misstatements, the teacher builds a critical attitude so that "the answer 'I don't know' is to be preferred to every doubtful answer."

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Requires directing the child's attention to the details that seem essential to adults, and pointing out the child's misstatements so gaps are tested against the actual experience rather than filled at will

Constraints¶

• The article states the training must imitate and accelerate what increasing years and accumulated experience otherwise bring about, implying it works by transforming the child's distribution of attention

Target Learners¶

• children

Target Learning Goals¶

• accurate reporting and testimony about observed experiences

Affordances¶

• Distribution Of Attention Report Account

Claims¶

• Children's reports of experiences are extremely unreliable, with more misstatements than adults' reports even when no motive to lie exists [+W]
• Free narrative reports are incomplete but relatively free from mistakes, while interrogatory reports contain a large proportion of wrong statements [+W]
• Younger children are much more suggestible than older children or adults in response to suggestive questions [+W]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Lipmann, O. (1911). Pedagogical Psychology of Report. The Journal of Educational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0070700