Variation in pedagogy affects overimitation in children and adolescents

S.D. was supported by The Société Académique Vaudoise and The Prepared Adult Initiative. A.F. was supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship (grant number ECF-2023-573). TG was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (PCEFP1_186832).Children are strong imitators, which sometimes leads to overimitation of causally unnecessary actions. Here, we tested whether learning from a peer decreases this tendency. First, sixty-five 7-10-year-old children performed the Hook task (i.e., retrieve a reward from a jar with tools) with child or adult demonstrators. The overimitation rate was lower after watching a peer than an adult. Second, we tested whether experiencing peer-to-peer learning versus adult-driven learning (i.e., Montessori versus traditional pedagogy) impacted overimitation. Sixty-six 4-18-year-old children performed the Hook task with adult demonstrators only. Montessori-schooled children had a lower propensity to overimitate. These findings emphasize the importance of the teaching model across the school years. While peer models favor selective imitation, adult models encourage overimitation.Peer reviewe

Divergent and Convergent Thinking across the Schoolyears: A Dynamic Perspective on Creativity Development

peer reviewedCreative thinking is critical to overcome many daily life situations. As such, there has been a growing interest on how creative thinking develops during childhood. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms driving its development. Indeed, almost all research has focused on divergent thinking, leaving aside convergent thinking, and did not thoroughly investigate how internal and/or external factors influence their development. Here, 222 children aged from 4 to 12 years old attending either a Montessori or a traditional school performed drawing-based convergent and divergent standardized tasks. In addition, a subset of 41 children were tested using similar tasks for a second session 3 years apart. The results revealed dynamic developmental stages of convergent and divergent thinking. More specifically, a loss of divergent thinking was counterbalanced by a gain of convergent thinking, especially during the fourth-grade slump (8–10 years old). Although Montessori-schooled children showed overall higher creative abilities than traditionally schooled children, no differences were observed in the developmental trajectories of convergent and divergent thinking between the two pedagogies. This suggests that progress and decrease in creative thinking may be mostly due to internal factors such as brain maturation factors than external factors such as peer pressure

When pedagogy matters : insights from Montessori education on the development of performance monitoring

The rapid pace of changes faced by todays young people calls for pedagogical prac- tices that equip them not only with knowledge but also with the ability to think effectively, flexibly, and independently. This process rely on performance moni- toring, a fundamental function of learning. When individuals notice something unexpected, such as an error, they tend to pause. In learning from this discrepant event, they adapt their behavior accordingly. Although performance monitoring is essential for academic learning and improves throughout childhood, its suscepti- bility to educational influences has not been studied. Pedagogical traditions differ on how they teach children to learn from feedback and errors. Traditional education provides children from one age group with op- portunities to engage in work, and then to learn about and correct their perfor- mance later based on a teachers feedback and evaluation. By contrast, Montessori education focuses on supporting children in self-correcting in real time. It utilizes specialized materials that encourage childrens self-discovery of relevant concepts, and multi-age classes in which children discuss answers as they work. Here, we compared performance monitoring in children aged 4-15 years attend- ing traditional or Montessori classes. Our multimodal approach (behavior, EEG, and MRI) revealed that 1) cortical regions related to performance monitoring un- dergo significant changes between the ages of 5 and 13 years; 2) children of that age do not process errors as adults do, and 3) pedagogical practices modulate both be- havior and neural responses. More specifically, the behavioral, morphometric and EEG neural data reveal significant differences in how students notice and react to errors, and in how they self-correct. fMRI analyses reveal difference in brain net- work connectivity between students from the two groups, and suggest differences in error correction strategies. Finally, higher academic performances were not at- tributable to higher executive functions, but rather differences in creativity abilities. Our work suggests that how students learn from errors reflects childhood schooling experience. Performance monitoring styles are also likely associated with youths cognitive flexibility more broadly, influencing how they react to novel or unex- pected outcomes. -- Au vu du rythme effréné des changements auxquels sont confrontés les jeunes, il est essentiel que les pratiques pédagogiques ne se concentrent pas uniquement sur la transmission de connaissances, mais également sur leur capacité dapprendre de manière efficace, flexible et indépendante. L’élément central à cette entreprise est de favoriser une approche autodirigée et orientée sur les processus, dans laque- lle les élèves développent la capacité d’apprendre de leurs erreurs. Ce processus est appelé la gestion de la performance. Bien que la gestion de la performance soit essentielle aux apprentissages scolaires et se développe durant l’enfance, sa sus- ceptibilité aux influences pédagogiques n’a pas encore été étudiée. Ici, nous avons comparé la gestion de la performance chez des enfants âgés de 4 à 15 ans, issus de classes traditionnelles ou Montessori. Alors que les pratiques pédagogiques traditionnelles mettent l’accent sur le fait que les élèves apprennent à partir des commentaires des enseignants, les pratiques pédagogiques Montessori encouragent les élèves à travailler de manière autonome avec du matériel spéciale- ment conçu pour permettre de faire et dapprendre de leurs erreurs. Notre approche multimodale (comportement, EEG, IRM) nous a permis de dévoiler que 1) les ré- gions corticales liées à la gestion de la performance subissent des changements im- portants entre 5 et 13 ans; 2) les enfants de cet âge ne traitent pas l'erreur de la même manière que les adultes, et que 3) les pratiques pédagogiques modulent à la fois le comportement et les réponses cérébrales. Ce travail constitue une première étape connectant la recherche sur la gestion de la performance avec l’émergence des habitudes mentales chez les enfants dans leurs environnements scolaires, avec des implications directes pour la recherche en développement, les professionnels de l’enfance, et les politiques

Children’s automatic evaluation of self-generated actions is different from adults

Performance monitoring (PM) is central to learning and decision making. It allows individuals to swiftly detect deviations between actions and intentions, such as response errors, and adapt behavior accordingly. Previous research showed that in adult participants, error monitoring is associated with two distinct and robust behavioral effects. First, a systematic slowing down of reaction time speed is typically observed following error commission, which is known as post-error slowing (PES). Second, response errors have been reported to be automatically evaluated as negative events in adults. However, it remains unclear whether (1) children process response errors as adults do (PES), (2) they also evaluate them as negative events, and (3) their responses vary according to the pedagogy experienced. To address these questions, we adapted a simple decision-making task previously validated in adults to measure PES as well as the affective processing of response errors. We recruited 8- to 12-year-old children enrolled in traditional (N = 56) or Montessori (N = 45) schools, and compared them to adults (N = 46) on the exact same task. Results showed that children processed correct actions as positive events, and that adults processed errors as negative events. By contrast, PES was similarly observed in all groups. Moreover, the former effect was observed in traditional schoolchildren, but not in Montessori schoolchildren. These findings suggest that unlike PES, which likely reflects an age-invariant attention orienting toward response errors, their affective processing depends on both age and pedagogy

Learning <i>by</i> Heart or <i>with</i> Heart: Brain Asymmetry Reflects Pedagogical Practices

Brain hemispheres develop rather symmetrically, except in the case of pathology or intense training. As school experience is a form of training, the current study tested the influence of pedagogy on morphological development through the cortical thickness (CTh) asymmetry index (AI). First, we compared the CTh AI of 111 students aged 4 to 18 with 77 adults aged > 20. Second, we investigated the CTh AI of the students as a function of schooling background (Montessori or traditional). At the whole-brain level, CTh AI was not different between the adult and student groups, even when controlling for age. However, pedagogical experience was found to impact CTh AI in the temporal lobe, within the parahippocampal (PHC) region. The PHC region has a functional lateralization, with the right PHC region having a stronger involvement in spatiotemporal context encoding, while the left PHC region is involved in semantic encoding. We observed CTh asymmetry toward the left PHC region for participants enrolled in Montessori schools and toward the right for participants enrolled in traditional schools. As these participants were matched on age, intelligence, home-life and socioeconomic conditions, we interpret this effect found in memory-related brain regions to reflect differences in learning strategies. Pedagogy modulates how new concepts are encoded, with possible long-term effects on knowledge transfer

Effects of Traditional Versus Montessori Schooling on 4‐ to 15‐Year Old children's Performance Monitoring

Through performance monitoring individuals detect and learn from unexpected outcomes, indexed by post-error slowing and post-error improvement in accuracy. Although performance monitoring is essential for academic learning and improves across childhood, its susceptibility to educational influences has not been studied. Here we compared performance monitoring on a flanker task in 234 children aged 4 through 15, from traditional or Montessori classrooms. While traditional classrooms emphasize that students learn from teachers' feedback, Montessori classrooms encourage students to work independently with materials specially designed to support learners discovering errors for themselves. We found that Montessori students paused longer post-error in early childhood and, by adolescence, were more likely to self-correct. We also found that a developmental shift from longer to shorter pauses post-error being associated with self-correction happened younger in the Montessori group. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that educational experience influences performance monitoring, with implications for neural development, learning, and pedagogy

Normative volumes and relaxation times at 3T during brain development.

While research has unveiled and quantified brain markers of abnormal neurodevelopment, clinicians still work with qualitative metrics for MRI brain investigation. The purpose of the current article is to bridge the knowledge gap between case-control cohort studies and individual patient care. Here, we provide a unique dataset of seventy-three 3-to-17 years-old healthy subjects acquired with a 6-minute MRI protocol encompassing T1 and T2 relaxation quantitative sequence that can be readily implemented in the clinical setting; MP2RAGE for T1 mapping and the prototype sequence GRAPPATINI for T2 mapping. White matter and grey matter volumes were automatically quantified. We further provide normative developmental curves based on these two imaging sequences; T1, T2 and volume normative ranges with respect to age were computed, for each ROI of a pediatric brain atlas. This open-source dataset provides normative values allowing to position individual patients acquired with the same protocol on the brain maturation curve and as such provides potentially useful quantitative biomarkers facilitating precise and personalized care

Variation in pedagogy affects overimitation in children and adolescents (dataset)

Overimitation in Montessori Childre

Variation in pedagogy affects overimitation in children and adolescents (dataset)

Overimitation in Montessori Childre