Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Debates assessing the merits of independent exploration and pedagogical instruction have been extensive. We compareeach of these learning environments against exploration followed by instruction to assess benefits to procedural learningand abstract rule-learning. Ninety-nine six-year-olds learned about novel locks and keys by either independently exploringprior to receiving instruction, proceeding to instruction without exploration, or acting without instruction. Children whoreceived instruction did not differ in procedural knowledge. However, children who explored prior to instruction were sig-nificantly more likely to learn the rules than children who did not explore or did not receive instruction. Childrens visualattention during instruction indicated that those who explored looked proportionally more to the stimuli as the experi-menter demonstrated. This suggests that the value of exploration is perhaps in preparing the learner for later information.Therefore, these results suggest that there is particular value for conceptual learning in the combination of exploration withinstruction.