Question: What kind of experiments do you do to investigate children's learning?

Jen Machin answered on 10 Mar 2015:

There are lots of different aspects to the way children learn, but the main one I focus on is how they learn from other people by copying. The things that children copy from adults (or other children) tell us a lot about how they learn – sometimes they might copy things exactly, or sometimes they might only copy some things and work out the rest of the problem on their own. This changes as children grow up and become adults. To investigate this, I show children videos of people doing something, normally a puzzle, and I try to see whether children can do the puzzle for themselves. I also try to see how they do it – whether they copy exactly what the adult on the video did, or whether they work out their own way to do it. Whilst the children watch the videos, their eyes are tracked, so we can see where they are looking on the screen and what is most important to them. This doesn’t hurt, and they don’t even know it’s being done – it’s just a little camera that sits on the desk in front of them and films the movement of their eyes.