We're going to the zoo: Interactive educational activities with animals boost category-based induction in children

Julia R. Badger; Laura R. Shapiro

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.10.003

We're going to the zoo: Interactive educational activities with animals boost category-based induction in children

Julia R. Badger^*
, Laura R. Shapiro

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

30 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We investigated whether category-based induction can be enhanced through educational activities with real-life animals. Four induction tasks involving pictures of real and novel biological kinds were administered to 252 children aged 5- to 7- years, split across two testing sessions. Between these two testing sessions, 129 of these children took part in a zoo-based educational activity where their attention was directed towards the importance of non-obvious category features. In the first testing session, older children made significantly more category inferences, consistent with developmental accounts of category-based induction. In the second testing session, there was a greater increase in category-based induction decisions made by children in the training condition. We suggest that category-based induction could be driven by an accumulation of category knowledge which leads to a deeper understanding of the importance of category features.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-10
Number of pages	10
Journal	Cognitive Development
Volume	49
Early online date	13 Nov 2018
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.10.003
Publication status	Published - 1 Jan 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding

The research took place at Aston University and was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council Studentship , and a Twycross Zoo Conservation Fund , awarded to the first author. We would like to thank the Education Team at Twycross Zoo and the staff and pupils at our participating schools for their contributions to this work. Appendix A

Keywords

Category
Child development
Education
Induction
Training

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10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.10.003

We’re going to the zoo: Interactive educational activities with animals boost category-based induction in children
© 2018, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Accepted author manuscript, 498 KBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Cite this

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abstract = "We investigated whether category-based induction can be enhanced through educational activities with real-life animals. Four induction tasks involving pictures of real and novel biological kinds were administered to 252 children aged 5- to 7- years, split across two testing sessions. Between these two testing sessions, 129 of these children took part in a zoo-based educational activity where their attention was directed towards the importance of non-obvious category features. In the first testing session, older children made significantly more category inferences, consistent with developmental accounts of category-based induction. In the second testing session, there was a greater increase in category-based induction decisions made by children in the training condition. We suggest that category-based induction could be driven by an accumulation of category knowledge which leads to a deeper understanding of the importance of category features.",

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We're going to the zoo: Interactive educational activities with animals boost category-based induction in children

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

Access to Document

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