Ontogeny of teaching behaviour in early childhood: What type of information do young children transmit to others?

Karadag Akkaya, Didar and Westermann, Gert and Bazhydai, Marina (2024) Ontogeny of teaching behaviour in early childhood: What type of information do young children transmit to others? PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Children effectively acquire knowledge from others and transmit the knowledge that they possess to others around them. Even though children’s abilities as active learners have been investigated vastly, research on children’s role as active transmitters of information remained scarce. This thesis explored the role of children, especially in the first two years of life, as active transmitters of information. The first chapter reviewed the literature on the development of teaching behaviour and factors influencing children's information transmission, focusing on the types of information young children choose to transmit. The second chapter investigated if toddlers preferred to transmit generalisable information. The findings of this study showed that a preference for transmitting generalisable information was not yet observed in toddlers. The third chapter examined how the method of learning about novel objects affected 2-year-olds' and 5-year-olds' transmission of information to a naïve learner. Results showed toddlers preferentially transmitted information they were taught, unlike 5-year-olds. The fourth chapter analysed home videos of infants aged 13 to 23 months to document natural information-transmission behaviours, revealing an increase in such activities from 13 months. The final chapter discussed the main findings from the studies reported here and evaluated how these findings fit with our current understanding. Combined, these findings provided useful insights on the role of information generalisability, learning context and early communicative interactions on the development of information transmission in early childhood. Overall, this thesis aimed to contribute to the conceptualisation of teaching as an information transmission mechanism embedded in social interactions.