According to an American study, five-year-olds reason more flexibly and less bias than undergraduate students. As a result, they have a better understanding of the technology.
Five-year-olds understand technology better than 20-year-olds. These are the astonishing results of a study conducted by American researchers from theUC Berkeley (California) and that of Edinburgh (Scotland). To reach this conclusion, these scientists gave the same tests to 106 children aged 4 to 5 years and to 170 undergraduates (Bac + 3). The aim of the research was to see which age group was best able to operate a game that had both physical and electrical elements that were unusually functioning. To do this, participants had to place geometric shapes (called Brickets) within a box in a certain order or in certain combinations in order to trigger light and music. And the results reported by the team go against popular belief. The “geek” generation is not “generation Y” (1).
Children less formatted in their reasoning mode
Indeed, after analyzing the data, the researchers found that since children are less formatted than adults by the concepts of cause and effect, they were able to resolve the problem posed by play more quickly. precisely the situation as it really takes place, and not as they imagine it happening according to formatted thought patterns ”, commented Alison Gopnik, psychologist at the University of Berkeley, co-author of this published study. in the journal Cognition.
An avenue to explore to decode learning
As a result, young children were much more receptive to the mechanisms that activate gadgets than students, who were looking for repetition and a rule and therefore found it difficult to rely on a single experience to find a cause-and-effect relationship. “The kids came to understand that the machine could work unexpectedly, while even the best students acted as if the machine was always going to follow the most common and obvious rule, even when they were shown it could work. differently, ”added Alison Gopnik.
Ultimately, the team admits that they have not yet drawn all the conclusions from this experience, “one of the big questions, if we look at it, is to know what makes the children of the learners more flexible. Are they just devoid of the prejudices of adults, or are they fundamentally more flexible or more open to exploring the world? Asks Christopher Lucas, co-author of this study for the University of Edinburgh. “Either way, children have a lot to teach us in terms of learning,” he concludes.
(1) People born approximately between the 1980s and the 1990s (according to sociologists) and the beginning of the 2000s
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