Thaindian News

Washington, July 1 (IANS) The conventional system of education can kill the spirit of inquiry in students when an instruction leaves something unsaid.

For instance, if someone showed you a novel gadget and told you, “Here’s how it works” while demonstrating a single push button function, what would you do?

You’d probably push the button. But what if the gadget had other functions? Would it occur to you to search for them, if your teacher hadn’t alluded to their existence?

Maybe, maybe not. It turns out that there is a “double-edged sword” to teaching. Explicit instruction makes children less likely to engage in spontaneous exploration and discovery, the journal Cognition reports.

“If I teach you this one thing and then I stop, then you may say, ‘Well that’s probably all there is’,” says MIT cognitive science associate professor Laura Schulz, who led the study.

Her team compared the behaviour of children given a novel toy under four different conditions, according to an MIT statement.

Those expressly taught one of its functions played with the toy for less time and discovered fewer things to do with it than children in the other three scenarios.

The danger is leading children to believe that they’ve learned all there is to know, thereby discouraging independent discovery that there could be other functions to the toy.