Ann L. Brown
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
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Educational Researcher | 1981
Ann L. Brown; Joseph C. Campione; Jeanne D. Day
Based on an invited address given by the first author at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association in Boston, April 1980.
Educational Researcher | 1994
Ann L. Brown
My title, The Advancement of Learning, is also taken from Bacon (1605). The title is a metaphor, as I will view the advancement of learning particularly during the 30 years or so since the cognitive revolution. Contemporary theories, unlike those of the past, concentrate on the learning of complex ideas as it occurs in authentic situations including, but not limited to, schools. In keeping with Bacon, I will paint a general picture of progress but at the same time add a cautionary note concerning the infanticide rate of our profession. We repeatedly throw out babies along with bathwater, when we should build cumulatively. No community can afford to lose so many valuable offspring in the service of progress.
Advances in Child Development and Behavior | 1975
Ann L. Brown
Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on three main aspects of memory and their ontogenesis. The first, “knowing,” refers to the developing knowledge of the world, or semantic memory, which the child brings to all memorial situations—be they deliberate or involuntary. The two other aspects, “knowing about knowing” and “knowing how to know,” have received more prior attention and, therefore, are treated superficially in this chapter. While much attention is focused on the semantic system, the importance of memorial or metamemorial skills is still recognized. Both the acquisition of mnemonic strategies and the ability to monitor and control them effectively are essential skills that must be mastered by an efficient information processor. Only when the child has mastered such skills can he begin to deal efficiently with an increasingly complex environment. “What is memory?” is the original question raised in this chapter.
Cognitive Science | 1990
Ann L. Brown
In this paper I discuss the curious lack of contact between developmental psychologists studying the principles of early learning and those concentrating on later learning in children, where predispositions to learn certain types of concepts are less readily discussed. Instead, there is tacit agreement that learning and transfer mechanisms are content-independent and age-dependent. I argue here that one cannot study learning and transfer in a vacuum and that childrens ability to learn is intimately dependent on what they are required to learn and the context in which they must learn it. Specifically, I argue that children learn and transfer readily, even in traditional laboratory settings, if they are required to extend their knowledge about causal mechanisms that they already understand. This point is illustrated In a series of studies with children from 1 to 3 years of age learning about simple mechanisms of physical causality (pushing-pulling, wetting, cutting, etc.). In addition, I document childrens difficulty learning about causally impossible events, such as pulling with strings that do not appear to make contact with the object they are pulling. Even young children transfer on the basis of deep structural principles rather than perceptual features when they have access to the requisite domain-specific knowledge. I argue that a search for causal explanations is the basis of broad understanding, of wide patterns of generalization, and of flexible transfer and creative inferential projections-in sum, the essential elements of meaningful learning.
Child Development | 1978
Ann L. Brown; Sandra S. Smiley
BROWN, ANN L., and SMILEY, SANDRA S. The Development of Strategies for Studying Texts. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 1076-1088. In a series of 3 experiments, the strategies of children and college students were examined as they attempted to study texts. College students, under various intentional learning instructions, displayed a clear diagnostic pattern. Following extended study they improved recall of important, but not unimportant, elements of texts. Eleventh and twelfth graders conformed to the adult pattern, but fifth through eighth graders were not as efficient. Older students benefited from increased study time because they possessed the necessary knowledge concerning the importance of text segments to enable them to concentrate on the essential. Younger students, not so prescient, did not concentrate exclusively on the important units, for they did not know what they were. Age was not the sole determinant of performance, for some students at each age spontaneously adopted the strategies of underlining or note-taking. Those who did concentrated on the important elements and subsequently approached the adultlike pattern in recall; those who did not displayed the immature pattern, even if induced to adopt I of the strategies.
Intelligence | 1978
Joseph C. Campione; Ann L. Brown
Abstract One approach to the understanding of intelligence is through research with retarded children and adults. Any characterization of the way(s) in which they differ from nonretarded individuals results in a specification of important components of intelligence. In this paper, we deal with two general areas of research. In one, centering on the role of control processes in memory and problem-solving situations, we argue that research with the retarded has succeeded in identifying a major component of intelligence. The results from a large number of experiments lead us to the conclusion that a hallmark of intelligence is the ability to generalize information from one situation to another, and that this ability in turn depends upon effective “executive control.” In areas where less research with retarded individuals has been doen, we suggest that comparative/developmental work is necessary to gain a better understanding of the processes in question. We illustrate this point by discussing some work aimed at locating individual differences in parameters representing basic components of general information-processing systems.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology | 1979
Sandra S. Smiley; Ann L. Brown
Abstract Two experiments examined the development of conceptual preference for either thematic (functional) or taxonomic relationships in a match-to sample task. In Experiment 1 twenty subjects from each of five age groups—preschool to old age—completed a method of triads preference test where they were forced to choose a thematic or taxonomic match. Young and old individuals preferred the thematic parings while school age and college adults preferred the taxonomic matches. Although the Age × Preference relation was pronounced, the majority of subjects at all ages could provide adequate justification of both the preferred and nonpreferred relationship. In addition, kindergarten subjects in Experiment 2 could readily be trained to respond on the basis of the nonpreferred mode. These data suggest that the pervasive shift in conceptual responding from syntagmatic to paradigmatic, thematic to taxonomic, etc., represents a change in preference rather than a shift to a fundamentally new way of organizing knowledge.
International Review of Research in Mental Retardation | 1974
Ann L. Brown
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the role of strategic behavior in retardate memory. Efficient performance on a variety of memory tasks relies on the effective use of certain plans schemes or mnemonic strategies. By the appropriate exploitation of various strategies, it is possible to organize and transform the random input of information into manageable information-rich units. Because it is as easy to remember a considerable amount of material in information-rich units as it is to remember a small amount of material in informationally impoverished units, it is economical to employ such strategies and plans in order to make the most effective use of a limited-capacity memory system. An examination of the theoretical and empirical developments, concerning the use of plans and strategies by young and retarded children, is discussed in this chapter. It presents a description of the general and developmental theories of memory, with specific relation to retardation. The place of deliberate strategies, control processes, or organization schemes, within these theories, is discussed in the chapter. A brief review of the empirical findings, implicating a strategic deficit in a wide variety of tasks and situations, is also discussed in this chapter. Two programs of research from authors laboratory and the implications of this research for educational practice are described in the chapter.
Cognitive Development | 1986
Ann L. Brown; Mary Jo Kane; Catharine H. Echols
Analogical transfer in 3- to 5-year-olds was examined in three studies where the children were required to notice the common underlying goal structure of a set of problems. The children were either required to recall the prototype story before tackling the transfer problem, or were explicitly prompted to attend to the common goal structure. Subjects who spontaneously focused on the goal structure in their recall, or who were prompted to do so, transferred efficiently regardless of age. Children who did not represent the problems at the level of underlying goal paths, but instead attended to interesting surface features of particular stories, failed to transfer. Children as young as 3 years of age have the underlying competence to transfer a common problem solution; level of representation rather than age determines transfer efficiency. Transfer flexibility is not a simple function of age but depends on the level of analysis afforded the base analogy. The results are discussed in terms of emergent theories of mental models for learning via analogy.
Cognition | 1990
Usha Goswami; Ann L. Brown
Childrens performance in the classical a:b::c:d analogy task is traditionally very poor prior to the Piagetian stage of formal operations. The interpretation has been that the ability to reason about higher-order relations (the relations between the a:b and c:d parts of the analogy) is late-developing. However, an alternative possibility is that the relations used to date in the analogies are too difficult for younger children. Two experiments presented children aged 3, 4 and 6 years with a:b::c:d analogies which were based on relations of physical causality such as melting and cutting, for example chocolate bar:melted chocolate::snowman:melted snowman. Understanding of these particular causal relations is known to develop between the ages of 3 and 4 years. It was found that even 3-year-olds could solve the classical analogies if they understood the causal relations on which they were based.