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5 Learning About Learning Robert S. Siegler 67 The prominence of the area of learning within developmental psychology varied widely during the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly’s first 50 years. In the journal’s first decades, the 1950s and 1960s, the area of children’s learning occupied a central place within the field of child development. Consider the following observation from the chapter on children’s learning in Carmichael’s Manual of Child Psychology that covered the period 1954–1970: “The number and quality of studies on children’s learning published each year have continued to increase . . . . By now there have been so many studies of children’s learning that it is impossible to review them adequately in one chapter . . . . Because of the vast number of publications, no attempt is made to include all possibly relevant studies” (Stevenson, 1970, pp. 849, 851, 852). Soon after Stevenson’s observation, however, the study of children ’s learning drastically declined. When Stevenson reviewed developments in the field of children’s learning between 1970 and 1983 in the next edition of the Manual (now called The Handbook of Child Psychology), his observation could hardly have been more different: “By the mid-1970s, articles on children’s learning dwindled to a fraction of the number that had been published in the previous decade, and by 1980, it was necessary to search with diligence to uncover any articles at all” (1983, p. 213). The reasons for this decline in the study of children’s learning are well known and have been discussed elsewhere (e.g., Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983; Siegler, 2000). Simply put, the decline of the field, along with the learning theory approach on which it was based, reflected both the limitations of the approach and the emergence of attractive alternatives. The tasks emphasized by learning theory, often derived from tasks used with nonhuman animals, generally bore only an abstract resemblance to the types of Robert S. Siegler 68 tasks that children learn in their daily lives. The learning theory assumption that acquisition processes were basically the same, regardless of species, age, or knowledge, precluded from consideration issues near and dear to the hearts of many developmentalists, such as developmental, individual, and species differences in learning. The depiction of children as passive organisms, dependent on the environment to stamp in connections, also was unappealing to a wide range of developmentalists. Thus, when the alternative of Piagetian theory was presented in a clear, appealing form in John Flavell’s influential 1963 book, The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget, the ideas found a ready audience . Although Piagetian theory had been evolving since the 1920s, the lack of translation of many works; the absence of clear, brief, integrative summaries of the central tenets of the theory; the difficult and unfamiliar vocabulary; and the idiosyncratic methodology that Piaget adopted to study children limited its appeal. However , Flavell’s compelling summary of the theory made clear its many intriguing aspects, as well as the many controversial claims that would stimulate a new generation of research. The rise of Piaget’s theory contributed to the temporary demise of the study of children’s learning not only because it led cognitive developmentalists to focus on other problems but also because Piaget drew a strict distinction between development and learning that dignified the one and devalued the other. This is evident in Piaget’s essay on the relation between learning and development : “The development of knowledge is a spontaneous process, tied to the whole process of embryogenesis. Learning presents the opposite case. In general, learning is provoked by situations—provoked by a psychological experimenter; or by a teacher, with respect to some didactic point; or by an external situation. It is provoked, in general, as opposed to spontaneous. In addition, it is a limited process—limited to a single problem, or to a single structure” (1964, p. 7). A second major influence on the field of cognitive development in the 1970s and 1980s, information processing theories, also contributed to the shift away from the study of learning, albeit for a different reason. Information processing theory always has viewed learning as central to development, but the strategy adopted by information processing researchers was first to describe in detail the beginning and end states of development and only then to focus on how children progress from the one to the other (Klahr & Wallace, 1976). Not until relatively recently have significant numbers of re- [18.221.165.246] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 07:48 GMT...

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