Answering Questions and Questioning Answers: Guiding Children to Intellectual Excellence.

Abstract

Mr. Sternberg describes strategies that teachers in any classroom and parents at any economic level can use help children develop their intelligence. SOMETIMES WE seek complicated solutions when simple ones are easier implement and more effective. For example, we can use many complex strategies reduce the risk of heart attack, but for most people the simplest ones -- exercising, eating a low-fat diet, taking an aspirin each day, giving up nicotine -- work as well as or better than many of the more complicated ones. Similarly, when it comes helping children develop their intelligence and thinking skills, there is a very simple solution that, though not a panacea, is probably one of the most effective strategies we can use help children develop the ability think. The strategy has do with how we answer children's questions. The Importance of Questions Children are natural question-askers. They have be if they are learn adapt a complex and changing environment. But whether they continue ask questions -- and especially, ask good questions -- depends in large part on how adults respond their questions. The ability ask good questions and know how answer them is an essential part of intelligence -- arguably the most important part.(1) And it is an ability that we can either foster or stifle. Lev Vygotsky proposed that a primary means by which we develop our intelligence is internalization.(2) We incorporate into ourselves what we absorb from being exposed and profiting from the environment. One example of this process is what Reuven Feuerstein referred as mediated learning experience.(3) The parent as teacher helps the child make sense of the environment by providing guidance the child in how interpret it. Feuerstein suggested that children who show deficient intellectual skills are often those who have been exposed insufficient mediation of their learning experiences. In this view, it is not enough just take the child a museum or see interesting sites. What is important is the mediation of the experience for the child by the parent or teacher. In Piagetian terms, such mediation helps children assimilate new experiences into existing schemata and accommodate more novel experiences through the formation of new schemata. When children seek such mediation by asking questions, parents and teachers have characteristic ways of responding. My argument in this article is that these characteristic ways of responding can be divided into seven levels, with higher levels representing superior mediation and thus superior opportunities for the child develop his or her higher-order thinking skills. My aim is elucidate the forms mediation takes and specify which forms are superior others. A Model of Interaction The model I propose is one that any mediator -- parent or teacher -- can understand and use immediately. The basic idea is that mediators who respond questions at higher levels are better at fostering the intellectual development of children. Consider as an example a question that arose when I visited Holland recently: Why are people in Holland so tall? For the first time in my life, I felt short. What's behind the considerable height of so many Dutch people? Let's consider the various levels of responses that this question and others like it might provoke. Level 1. Rejection of questions. When mediators respond at this level, the basic message the child is shut up. Questions are seen as inappropriate or as irritations. Children should learn to be seen and not and stay in their place. The result of consistent punishment for asking questions is, of course, that children learn not ask questions. Hence they learn not learn. All of us would probably like believe that we would never respond children's questions at such a low and even offensive level. Perhaps we've heard parents on the bus or in the subway treat children like this, but we would never do so ourselves. …