Young children practise for the future

A University of Queensland study is helping parents and teachers understand the capacity of young children to learn independently, by providing insight into children's understanding of practice. The study, led by UQ School of Psychology PhD student Melissa Brinums, investigated the age at which children start to regulate their own learning to achieve their long-term goals. "As adults, we learn skills and information for the future on a regular basis, but we know very little about how children develop this capacity," Ms Brinums said. "I wanted to understand how this capacity develops because it has vast implications for children's learning and academic achievement as well as their success and expertise in later life." The researchers tested 120 children aged four to seven years. Children in one room were shown three games involving motor skills and told they would be later tested on one of them, the target game, winning stickers based on their performance. Children were then brought to a different room with replicas of the games they had seen in the first room and told they had five minutes to play with any of the games before returning to the first room for the test. The researchers anticipated that children who understood that practice could help their future performance would spend more time playing the target game than the other two games.