Preschool Reading Study

 A new study found that parents and other caregivers are reading less often to their preschool-aged children than before the pandemic. The study also suggested that certain factors lead to a greater likelihood of regular shared reading habits at home, and others appear to have the opposite effect. Those insights may be useful to educators as they guide families toward establishing strong shared-reading habits at home—which can boost early literacy skills and hook kids on the joy of reading for fun. Having children’s books in the house increases the likelihood of shared reading. Kids who spent more time on screens got less shared reading time with parents or caregivers, and vice versa.

Jung K., & Barnett,. W. (2026).  Parent-Child Shared Book Reading With Preschoolers During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA,  9(8),  e2631611. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.31611

Theory of mind selectively predicts preschoolers’ knowledge-based selective word learning

Preschoolers who scored higher on "theory of mind" tests were better at discerning between accurate and inaccurate sources of information, according to a study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Study co-author Patricia Brosseau-Liard notes empathy is only one factor contributing to selective learning.

Abstract:
Children can selectively attend to various attributes of a model, such as past accuracy or physical strength, to guide their social learning. There is a debate regarding whether a relation exists between theory-of-mind skills and selective learning. We hypothesized that high performance on theory-of-mind tasks would predict preference for learning new words from accurate informants (an epistemic attribute), but not from physically strong informants (a non-epistemic attribute). Three- and 4-year-olds (N = 65) completed two selective learning tasks, and their theory-of-mind abilities were assessed. As expected, performance on a theory-of-mind battery predicted children's preference to learn from more accurate informants but not from physically stronger informants. Results thus suggest that preschoolers with more advanced theory of mind have a better understanding of knowledge and apply that understanding to guide their selection of informants. This work has important implications for research on children's developing social cognition and early learning.

Brosseau-Liard, P., Penney, D. and Poulin-Dubois, D. (2015), Theory of mind selectively predicts preschoolers’ knowledge-based selective word learning. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 33: 464–475. doi: 10.1111/bjdp.12107

Preschooler problem solving

A recent study finds that preschoolers are better at operating gadgets than college students -- findings attributed to the way young children approach problem solving. Exploratory learning, characterized by a tendency to test unusual theories, comes naturally to young children, researchers say.
Children learn causal relationships quickly and make far-reaching causal inferences from what they observe. Acquiring abstract causal principles that allow generalization across different causal relationships could support these abilities. We examine children's ability to acquire abstract knowledge about the forms of causal relationships and show that in some cases they learn better than adults. Adults and 4- and 5-year-old children saw events suggesting that a causal relationship took one of two different forms, and their generalization to a new set of objects was then tested. One form was a more typical disjunctive relationship; the other was a more unusual conjunctive relationship. Participants were asked to both judge the causal efficacy of the objects and to design actions to generate or prevent an effect. Our results show that children can learn the abstract properties of causal relationships using only a handful of events. Moreover, children were more likely than adults to generalize the unusual conjunctive relationship, suggesting that they are less biased by prior assumptions and pay more attention to current evidence. These results are consistent with the predictions of a hierarchical Bayesian model.
Gopnik, A.,  Bridges, S., Griffiths, T., Lucas, C. (2014). When children are better (or at least more open-minded) learners than adults: developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships.Cognition, 131(2):284-99.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24566007