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created over 3 years ago | Tagged: |
Byron
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These museum trips seem like a good idea, but how much do children really learn from their day out? According to Julien Gross and colleagues, young children actually remember a great deal, especially if they are given the chance to draw as they recount their museum experience.
bps-research-digest.blogspot.com
Fifty-eight lucky New Zealand school children, aged approximately six years, were taken for a day visit to the Royal Albatross Centre and Historic Fort in Dunedin. One to two days later, the amount of information recalled by the children depended to a large degree on how they were tested. Asked to freely recall the visit, the children remembered a significant amount of factual and trivial, "narrative" information, uttering an average of ten factual clauses. Crucially, this amount of factual recall doubled when they were allowed to draw at the same time as they recounted the day's events. By contrast, the children performed relatively poorly when given a traditional comprehension test in the form of 12 questions.
bps-research-digest.blogspot.com
A second study largely replicated these findings with a second group of children who were tested on their memory for the museum visit after seven months. The amount of information they recalled remained substantial but was reduced, as you'd expect after a longer delay. Also, the benefit of drawing now only affected recall of narrative information, not facts.
bps-research-digest.blogspot.com
Why the difference in performance between free recall and the comprehension test? Analysis of the content of the children's free recall revealed that they tended to remember facts that were not tapped by the traditional comprehension test, which had of course been devised by adults. This tallies with previous research showing that children and adults tend to focus on different aspects of the same events.
bps-research-digest.blogspot.com
Gross's team said the results "demonstrated that children learned and remembered an extraordinary amount of information about a school trip to a museum" even after a lengthy delay. The findings also showed that giving the children the opportunity to draw, significantly increased the amount of accurate information they recalled. This is consistent with previous, forensically motivated research showing that drawing facilitates children's verbal reports of their experiences.
