Andrew Meltzoff provides food for thought for educators and parents concerned about the influences on children—from toddlers to teenagers—and their learning potential. "By understanding children, we come to understand ourselves a little bit better," Meltzoff said during his Distinguished Lecture presentation.
Meltzoff, professor of psychology and codirector of the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, shared insights from brain-related studies that have implications for how youngsters learn.
Andrew Meltzoff
He highlighted the importance of understanding factors that influence children's learning before they enter kindergarten. "It's obvious that we're role models for teenagers," he said, but it's not as obvious that we're role models for children from the time they're born. Whether we realize it or not, he noted, babies are "looking up and watching us, and it deeply affects their behavior."
In studying toddlers, for example, Meltzoff found that they will imitate the actions they've seen a peer perform, and that they can remember these actions and repeat them a day later.
Meltzoff's studies also support what many parents have suspected—that what their children watch on television can affect their actions. Babies imitate actions they've seen on TV and remember them 24 hours later. It's a scientific fact that children will repeat what they see on the screen, he said. "I'm not a policymaker and can't tell parents what they should or shouldn't show their children on television. But I can do studies and share with policy makers that little children—children even before language—will copy the actions that they see."
Besides these influences, University of Washington researchers also studied language learning in youngsters. Babies in the first six months of life are "citizens of the world," Meltzoff said. These young babies can distinguish sounds from languages all over the world, he said, but after six months, "they become culturally bound listeners and begin to lose that ability."
One of Meltzoff's colleagues at the university, Patricia Kuhl, investigated what kinds of interventions might help children retain an openness to many languages. During 12 sessions, Chinese graduate students read storybooks in Chinese to American babies. The children who heard these storybooks performed just as well on assessments of language distinctions as children being raised in Taiwan, researchers found.
"So we know some secrets about what interventions to use to have them pronounce certain vowel sounds in certain ways," Meltzoff said. Meltzoff and Kuhl, who are married and have a child of their own, shared some of their findings in the recent book The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn.
In response to the research, toy manufacturers showed an interest in making Chinese language tapes for babies, so the university's researchers designed tests to determine whether the tapes would work. They made audiotapes and DVD recordings of the same Chinese graduate students reading the same Chinese books and played them for different groups of babies.
Both sets of tests indicated that "the babies didn't learn a thing," Meltzoff said. "They only learn from real human teachers, real human interaction with them. Even when the identical Chinese sounds bathed their little eardrums in identical ways, they learned nothing." Further study is needed to more fully understand children's speech development and imitative behavior, he said.
When considering how these research findings might affect public policy, Meltzoff stated that four groups need to get together to change things: the research community, public policy people, practicing educators, and the private sector. Meltzoff stressed his commitment to helping those groups join forces.
Audio Highlights
To hear an audio excerpt from Andrew Meltzoff's session or from other sessions at the 2004 Annual Conference, go to the Annual Conference section of the ASCD Web site at http://www.ascd.org/annualconference, then to the Post-Conference Highlights, and click on the Audio Highlights link.
You will also find interviews with presenters under the Speaker Spotlight link on the Annual Conference page.