New research challenges Jean Piaget’s conclusions and indicates that children have the ability to solve problems algorithmically earlier than previously thought.
In a cafe, a small child dumps his mother’s suitcase in search of gummy candies. The contents spread across the table, bench and floor. It’s a chaotic – but functional – solution to the problem.
Children have an inclination towards unconventional thinking which, at first glance, may seem cluttered. This type of apparently chaotic behavior served as inspiration for developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s best-known theory: that children build their knowledge through experience and must go through four sequential phaseswith the first two lacking the ability to use structured logic.
Piaget continues to be the biggest name in developmental psychology. It fundamentally and forever changed the world’s view of children, showing that they are not born with the same conceptual building blocks as adults, but need to build them through experience. No one before or after him has assembled such a vast catalog of peculiar childhood behaviors that researchers are still able to replicate in individual children today.
Although Piaget was certainly correct in observing that children engage in a range of unusual behaviors, a laboratory recently discovered evidence that overthrow some old assumptions about the limits of children’s logical abilities, arising from their work. New in the journal Nature Human Behavior describes how young children are able to find systematic solutions to complex problems without any instruction.
Organize things
Throughout the 1960s, Piaget observed that young children depend on clumsy trial and error methodsrather than systematic strategies, when they attempt to order objects according to some continuous quantitative dimension, such as length. For example, a 4-year-old child, when asked to arrange sticks from shortest to longest, will move them randomly and usually will not achieve the desired final order.
Psychologists have interpreted young children’s inefficient behavior on these types of ordering tasks — which we call a seriation task — as an indicator that they cannot use systematic strategies to solve problems. until at least 7 years of age.
Somewhat counterintuitively, the study found that increasing the difficulty and cognitive demands of the ranking task actually led young children to discover and use algorithmic solutions to resolve.
Piaget’s classic study asked children to arrange some visible items, such as wooden sticks, in order of height. Huiwen Alex Yang, a PhD student in psychology who works with computational learning models, increased the difficulty of the task. With the help of collaborator Bill Thompson, Yang created a computer game that required children to use feedback cues to infer the height order of items hidden behind a wall.
The game asked children to order rabbit-like creatures from lowest to highest by clicking on their sneakers to swap their positions. The creatures only changed places if they were in the wrong order; otherwise, they remained in the same location. As they could only see the rabbits’ shoes and not their heights, the children had to resort to logical inference instead of direct observation to solve the task. Yang tested 123 children between the ages of 4 and 10.
Develop a strategy
Children independently discovered and applied at least two sorting algorithms well known. These strategies – called selection sort and jitter sort – are typically studied in computer science.
More than half of the children demonstrated evidence of structured algorithmic thinking, and this at ages as young as 4 years old. Although older children were more likely to use algorithmic strategies, the finding contrasts with Piaget’s belief that children were incapable of this type of systematic strategic planning before the age of 7. Piaget believed that children needed to first reach what he called the concrete operations phase of development.
The results suggest that children are actually able to spontaneously discover logical strategies much earlier when circumstances require it. In the task, a trial and error strategy would not work because the objects to be sorted were not directly observable; children could not rely on perceptual feedback.
Explaining the results requires a more nuanced interpretation of Piaget’s original data. Although children may still prefer seemingly less logical solutions to problems during the first two Piagetian stages, this does not mean that they are incapable of acting otherwise if the situation demands it.
A systematic approach to life
Algorithmic thinking is crucial not only in advanced math classes, but also in everyday life. Imagine you need to bake two dozen cookies, but your favorite recipe only makes one. You could repeat all the steps in the recipe twice, washing the bowl in between, but you would never do that because you know it would be inefficient. Instead, I would double the ingredients and would perform each step only once. Algorithmic thinking allows us to identify a systematic way to deal with the need to make twice as many cookies, which improves the efficiency of their preparation.
Algorithmic thinking is a important and useful capacity for children, as they learn to move and interact in the world – and we now know that they have access to these skills much earlier than psychologists believed.
The fact that children can engage in algorithmic thinking before formal instruction has important implications for STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – education. Caregivers and educators now need to rethink when and how they offer children the opportunity to deal with more abstract problems and concepts. Knowing that children’s minds are ready for structured problems as early as preschool means we can nurture these abilities earliercontributing to the development of more solid mathematical and calculation skills.
And be patient the next time you find children interacting with the world in ways that may not be the most convenient. When picking up your belongings from the floor of a café, remember that this is all part of the process of building children’s knowledge. Those seemingly chaotic children will soon demonstrate more logical behavior.
