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Cited by 730

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 34 of the 34 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery

Open access
Bonawitz, Elizabeth, Shafto, Patrick, Gweon, Hyowon, Goodman, Noah D., Spelke, Elizabeth, Schulz, Laura·2011·Cognition
DOI 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.001
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Abstract

Motivated by computational analyses, we look at how teaching affects exploration and discovery. In Experiment 1, we investigated children’s exploratory play after an adult pedagogically demonstrated a function of a toy, after an interrupted pedagogical demonstration, after a naïve adult demonstrated the function, and at baseline. Preschoolers in the pedagogical condition focused almost exclusively on the target function; by contrast, children in the other conditions explored broadly. In Experiment 2, we show that children restrict their exploration both after direct instruction to themselves and after overhearing direct instruction given to another child; they do not show this constraint after observing direct instruction given to an adult or after observing a non-pedagogical intentional action. We discuss these findings as the result of rational inductive biases. In pedagogical contexts, a teacher’s failure to provide evidence for additional functions provides evidence for their absence; such contexts generalize from child to child (because children are likely to have comparable states of knowledge) but not from adult to child. Thus, pedagogy promotes efficient learning but at a cost: children are less likely to perform potentially irrelevant actions but also less likely to discover novel information.

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Metadata

Authors
Bonawitz, E., Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Goodman, N. D., Spelke, E., & Schulz, L.
Venue
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2011-09
Volume
120
Issue
3
Pages
322-330
ISSN
0010-0277 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.001
OpenAlex
W2120662243
Cited by
730
References
34
FWCI
52.86
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.001
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Bonawitz, E., Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Goodman, N. D., Spelke, E., & Schulz, L. (2011). The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.001

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.