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Jennifer Edeburn
Oddly this came up just the other day as my teenage daughter was bragging that she had more living neurons than I ever would again and therefore she was more intelligent than I. I pointed out that her younger brother potentially had even more and asked if he was more intelligent than she. What is intelligence? Is it the ability to apply knowledge? The ability to take in knowledge? The ability to synthesize two disparate pieces of knowledge to create new knowledge? In the end, my daughter agreed that despite our difference in total neuron count, it's likely that in a set of real world tasks I would perform more successfully than she and therefore would be perceived by an impartial observer reviewing only the results as being more intelligent. Therefore I answer your question as No, since I believe training and experience comprises an essential component of intelligence and children generally have significantly less training and experience than adults.
There is another component of your question as well though; whether or not children will learn better if exposed immediately to complex concepts top down using computers -- can they be trained from the top down, or must they build a foundation?
This is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, but I suggest a parallel to infant development. Anyone who has ever watched an infant develop over the course of the first year is able to observe things like the development of object permanence, where infants become able to remember and look for things that drop out of their line of sight. Although the "strictness" of object permanence has come somewhat into question lately, there is no doubt that the behavior of a four month old and a nine month old is noticeably different if you take a cup off the front of the high chair tray and lower it below the tray so that it is hidden from them. This is not a matter of nobody teaching them a complex concept, it is a matter of them not having the brain development to master this complex concept. Many other examples are available from Piaget's stages of cognitive development where the ability of a child to master a concept is based on both environmental exposure and biological maturation.
So here again, I do not believe that simply exposing children to complex concepts from the outset will be more effective than traditional methods of learning. I think this is true whether we are exposing them via computer or traditional methods. I do agree that failing to expose children to concepts that are more complex than their current level of cognition hinders learning.
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Oddly this came up just the other day as my teenage daughter was bragging that she had more living neurons than I ever would again and therefore she was more intelligent than I. I pointed out that her younger brother potentially had even more and asked if he was more intelligent than she. What is intelligence? Is it the ability to apply knowledge? The ability to take in knowledge? The ability to synthesize two disparate pieces of knowledge to create new knowledge? In the end, my daughter agreed that despite our difference in total neuron count, it's likely that in a set of real world tasks I would perform more successfully than she and therefore would be perceived by an impartial observer reviewing only the results as being more intelligent. Therefore I answer your question as No, since I believe training and experience comprises an essential component of intelligence and children generally have significantly less training and experience than adults.
There is another component of your question as well though; whether or not children will learn better if exposed immediately to complex concepts top down using computers -- can they be trained from the top down, or must they build a foundation?
This is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, but I suggest a parallel to infant development. Anyone who has ever watched an infant develop over the course of the first year is able to observe things like the development of object permanence, where infants become able to remember and look for things that drop out of their line of sight. Although the "strictness" of object permanence has come somewhat into question lately, there is no doubt that the behavior of a four month old and a nine month old is noticeably different if you take a cup off the front of the high chair tray and lower it below the tray so that it is hidden from them. This is not a matter of nobody teaching them a complex concept, it is a matter of them not having the brain development to master this complex concept. Many other examples are available from Piaget's stages of cognitive development where the ability of a child to master a concept is based on both environmental exposure and biological maturation.
So here again, I do not believe that simply exposing children to complex concepts from the outset will be more effective than traditional methods of learning. I think this is true whether we are exposing them via computer or traditional methods. I do agree that failing to expose children to concepts that are more complex than their current level of cognition hinders learning.
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Continue reading...
