European Journal at Psychology at Education1986, Vol. I, N." 3, 31-46© 1986, I.S.P.A.

The Origin of the Child's Ideaof Learning Through Practice

Ingrid PramlingUniversity of Goteborg, Sweden

To discover qualitatively different ways in which childrenthink of their own learning 149 children aged 3-8 years wereinterviewed in QI pre-school context. One of the most interestingfindings concerns the child's increasing awareness of his orher own role in the learning process. it was found that thestage at which children see learning as a result of practice wasimmediately preceded by one at which they see learning asa result of an incidental activity.

Introduction

31

Previously a distinction was made between learners who experience that theyare playing an active role in learning and those who do not, 1. e. learners whothink of learning as «something they do» and those who think of it as «somethingthat happens to them» (Marton, 1975, P. 130).

This distinction was originally made on the basis of differences found amonguniversity students; more specifically it represents an aspect of the difference betweena deep and surface approach to learning (see, e. g. Marton & Saljo, 1984). As faras the former is concerned, the learner's attention is directed towards the phenomenadealt with in the text he or she is trying to understand better. In the case of thelatter, the learner's attention is directed towards the text itself; he or she is simplytrying to memorize it. The two approaches seem to be closely related to the wayin which the learner thinks about learning in general. Even if the distinction betweenthe deep and surface approach to learning was originally defined in relation toreading academic articles, it seems reasonable to expect some general sign of thisat a much earlier stage.

The difference between the learner experiencing that he or she is playing anactive role in learning versus not doing so recur in a somewhat paradoxical manner

The research reported here was financially supported by a grant from the Swedish Council forResearch in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

32 1. PRAMLING

at different stages of development. In the case of the reading of academic texts,when understanding is required, experiencing that one is playing a passive role inlearning (adopting a surface approach) means that the learner tries to memorize thetext (instead of engaging in analytically interpretative mental work). In the case ofless sophisticated forms of learning, when the task is in fact to memorize something,an attempt to do so implies that the learner realizes his or her own active rolein learning.

For instance, Flavell (1977) has studied the relationship between awarenessand memory in an experiment in which children of different ages were shown a seriesof pictures of common objects. The experimenter pointed out two or three of thepictures and the child then had to point out the same pictures, in the same orderas the experimenter, after a few seconds interval. Among the 5-year-olds, very fewmade any attempt to repeat the object of the pictures to be able to point them out.With increasing age, however, more and more children practise sorting out thepictures. Children were then asked to rehearse, and it was found that youngerchildren were also able to point out the objects correctly. According to Flavell, thisshows that children who have no awareness of the importance of their own activityin relation to the results make no attempt to memorize the objects. Kail (1979) alsoshowed that children will make no attempt at mnemonic strategies before they areaware of what it means to remember. The fact that the child makes deliberateattempts to learn something by means of such strategies can be seen as a firststep in an understanding of one's own role in learning.

It should be pointed out that in Flavell's investigation rehearsal, i. e. practicewas a starting point. He simply observed whether or not children used any strategiesin order to be able to recall something. In our case the idea of learning throughpractice was by no means assumed in advance, it was something that the childrencame up with in the interview carried out. This is also true of all the different waysof thinking about learning we found in our investigation. The idea of learning throughpractice and the developmental context in which this conceptualization is embodiedwere not hypothesized but discovered.

Another difference between the study by Flavell described above and ours isthat while Flavell's study was carried out as an experiment, this study concentrateson the problems that seem important to the child in an everyday situation. Yetanother difference stems from the methodology used. In Flavell's study, children'sbehaviour was observed, while in the present case children were interviewed. Bydoing so we hoped to be able to show in more detail how the child's idea of learningthrough practice evolves.

Research approach

The study of children's learning, on the one hand, and their conceptualization ofthis learning, on the other, represent two different kinds of research labelled byMarton (1981) as research within the first-order and second-order perspectives.Research within the first-order perspective, i. e. how children learn, has been In

focus for quite a long time (e. g. Stevenson 1972, Holt 1980), while research withinthe second-order perspective, i. e. how children think they learn, can be viewed aspart of the research domain recently called phenomenography (Marton op, cit.), Thisis a research programme aimed at describing people's conceptions of the world aroundthem in an attempt to map the «collective mind», i. e. the complex of conceptionsheld by people about various phenomena. Research within the second-order perspec­tive entails the study of metacognitive phenomena.

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE 33

Phenomenography deals with the qualitatively different ways in which peopleexperience or think about various phenomena. This implies, as Marton (in press)says, «that phenomenography is neither about the phenomena that are experiencedor thought about as such, nor is it about the human beings, who are doing theexperiencing or thinking, themselves. Phenomenography is precisely about the relationsbetween human beings and the world around them». This means that the approachis much more content-oriented than in traditional psychology. There are many simi­larities here to the descriptions Piaget made in his earlier work, where he providedus with an analysis of the qualitatively different ways in which children view variousaspects of the world.

The research approach is developed with the purpose of describing people's waysof thinking about phenomena, principles or ideas as they themselves express them.

In most of the research carried out within a phenomenographic perspective,data for analysis is collected by means of interviews. In these, Piaget's method inclinical interviews is used as a basis. The interviewer's purpose is to get the subjectto explore his or her thinking as far as it is possible or as far as the person is willingto go. When it comes to collecting data on children, interviews are still the mainapproach, but observation is often made as well, mainly for obtaining a frame ofreference for understanding what the children are talking about. Puppets, drawings,etc. are often used when talking with children.

The analysis is based on word-for-word transcriptions of the interviews. It isexplorative and the researcher has to discover qualitatively different conceptionswhich can be placed in categories. To delimit and describe categories of conceptionshas a long tradition within the field of child development (see e. g. Werner, 1959;Piaget, 1975), As in Piagetian research. finding the categories is a form of discovery.Once the discovery has been made, however, one should certainly be able to commu­nicate it so that other researchers can use the inteIIectual tools acquired (Johansson,Marton & Svensson, 1985).

Our aim in working with this article is to present some findings which shedlight on the learner's first awareness of his or her own active role in learning. Thisawareness seems to first appear when the learner realizes that he or she can acquirea certain skill by means of repeatedly engaging in a relevant activity, i. e. throughpractice. We would like to present an empirical characterization of the origin ofthis idea in children. When we talk about revealing «the origin of an idea» we meanthat its developmental context is described. The expression «the developmental contextof a certain idea» refers to these ideas or conceptions of a phenomena which thisparticular idea of the phenomenon succeeds and precedes in a developmentalsuccession.

Although this paper is aimed at presenting some specific findings, it should benoted, that as we pointed out above, the investigation from which the results pre­sented below are taken was simply aimed at describing the different ways in whichchildren conceptualize the phenomena of learning. It was thus not set up from thebeginning to demonstrate any specific steps in the development of the child's con­ception of learning. All the steps had to be found first.

Method

This is a kind of research where the discovery and description of children'sconceptions of the phenomena of learning produce results of a qualitative nature.It is, in other words, a question of recording what different conceptions there areto be found among children, as they appear in children's expressions when they think

34 I. PRAMLING

and reflect about it. There are so to soy, no a priori categories, into which children'sconceptions should he placed. The task of the researcher is to find similarities anddifferences among answers and to describe variations in the way of thinking (see e. g.Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Marton, 1981). The different categories of conceptions shouldbe seen as the main results, while the quantitative results which account for theextent to which these categories were found at different levels of development,should be seen as a complement which provides information on the developmentaltrend.

Subjects

Table 1 below shows that 149 children, with approximately 25 in each age group,participated in the study which forms the basis of this presentation. The variationin age was from 2 years 9 months to 8 years 8 months. The two sexes were equallyrepresented. (Mean age = 5.7; SD = 1.6).

Table 1: Number of children in each age group (Total = 149)

Age

n3

13

4

285

276

277

288

26

Tableau 1: Nombre d'eniants dans chaque classe d'dge (Total = 149)

Children participating were selected from a range of different types of housingarea. They were all involved in some kind of pre-school activity (schoolchildren'sleisure time activity also being included). Children were individually interviewed inthe pre-school environment.

Interviews

The clinical interview method developed by Piaget was used, but with a differentpurpose. Piaget wanted to grasp the child's structure of thinking, and for this purposehe used interviews to test questions to see if the child was able to give an appropriateresponse or to study how he or she dealt with the question or the task. Questionsin natural science were in focus, to which there was always a correct answer. Theproblems or tasks with which the child was confronted were often far from the child'severyday life. In Piaget's questions there are a number of stumbling blocks. Onecould say that he, in a way, imposed upon the child, since he was often not concernedabout children's conceptions as SUCh, but about the general way of thinking whichhe found behind the child's statements. In this study, the content was of a centralimportance. The phenomena dealt with were not such that required a «correct»answer to be found. Our point of departure was that the child should never feelthat he or she was a failure, since we were genuinely interested in what he or shesaid. We asked direct questions about what we were interested in and did not lookfor the thinking behind it. This is why the content of the notions that were discussedacquired greater significance.

The purpose of the interview was to encourage the children to reflect abouttheir own learning, and to get them to explore their thoughts as far as possible.This meant that an interviewer should not be satisfied with the first answer, butshould let the child continue until he or she had no more to add. It was obvious that

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE 35

the more the questioning assumed the character of a narrative, where the childcould refer to his or her experiences the more willing the child becomes to expressand elaborate his or her thoughts (Doverborg & Pramling, 1985).

The beginning of the interview was always introduced with «Tell me somethingyou have learnt». This question was then put in many different contexts, such as inpre-school groups, in class discussions, at home, in school (for children attending).or in the context of what the teacher wanted them to learn. etc. After the child'ssuggestion of what he has learnt, the interviewer continued with «How did you goabout learning that?», But there was also a group of questions in which the interviewersuggested a series of different learning activities and the child had to explain howhe or she would go about learning that activity (e. g. riding a bike, learning a phonenumber, playing an instrument, etc.). The interviewer also asked: «Is there any wayyou can become better at playing an instrument, etc.?»

The fixed group of questions must be seen as a starting point for the dialoguewith the child, while how far the dialogue could be developed depended on theindividual child. The large variation in age among the children participating in theinterviews meant, of course, that they understood, and consequently, were able toanswer questions to differing extents. But the main idea was to get the child totalk about different types of learning in different contexts and to follow up his orher answers with further questions along these lines, until the interviewer realisedthat it was not worth continuing. The interviews lasted about 20 minutes (with avariation of 10 to 35 minutes).

Analysis

The interviews were taped and transcribed verbatim. The transcribed interviewsthen constituted the material for analysis which was initially carried out by readingthe material repeatedly, Each interview wcs dealt with as a whole in this phase ofthe analysis - the global impression was, in other words, in focus. Through readingthe material repeatedly, particular statements emerged that appeared to be relevantto what was being studied, which was in this case, conceptions of learning. The nextstep was to compare ideas to see if these referred to the same context, or if theyrefer to a qualitatively different one. By concentrating on the meaning of the state­ments children made, it was then possible to group these according to their qualitativesimilarities and differences. When some idea of the variety of conceptions was acqui­red, the interviews had to be approached in a more systematic way. In going throughthe material systematically, the picture of the whole was modified. This is a pro­cedure which was repeated several times until one had grasped the variation in termsof categories in which children's conceptions could be described. This is a procedurethat continues until saturation point is reached - that is, when all answers have beencategorized. Further, that subcategories have been distinguished and the perspectiveof the child can not be described more fully by any further distinctions being made.

When the categories have been thoroughly defined and described, as shown inthe result section, every interview is categorized. This means that conceptions arecategorized, not children. Consequently, one child could express many different ideas,categorized into many conceptions, while another child only expressed one idea.which then fell into only one category.

After children's conceptions of learning in the total interview study were cate­gorized, 30 randomly chosen interviews were evaluated by someone else. Agreementon whether or not a certain category was applicable to an interview record wasfound to vary between 86 and 100 '0/0 for the various categories, with a medianof 97 %. This figure can be considered to indicate satisfactory degree of reliability.

36

Results

I. PRAMLING

To understand the origin of the child's idea of learning through practice, someof the findings from the total study have to be developed. This article only focuseson a specific but significant step in the development of children's conceptions of theirown learning.

Children's conceptions of learning are dealt with in Pramling (1983) in termsof their two related aspects: what to learn and how to learn. In Figure 1 we cansee a minor part of the total structure of the development of children's conceptionsof these aspects and how they differentiate into categories and subcategories. In thefigure only the parts of the structure which is of specific relevance for the resultsdiscussed in the present paper is illustrated. In relation to the «what» aspect oflearning, there seem to be three kinds of answers which represent three levels ofawareness of learning. The progression in awareness goes from understanding oflearning to do, to learning to know, and later to learning to understand. Learningto do is a category in which children perceive manual skills, activities or behaviouras examples of what they learn (e. g. «I have learnt to ride my bike» or «I learntto eat with a knife and fork»). At the next level of awareness, learning to know,one can see children conceptualizing learning as representing gaining knowledgeabout something in the world (e. g. «I have learnt not to touch dead animals becausethey can have germs on them»). Finally, conceptualizing learning to understand refersto the realization of same meaning or state of affairs. The child thinks of learning assomething that takes place within him or her (e. g. «I didn't understand about trafficwhen I was three, though I knew what cars were»).

Figure 1: The partial structure 0/ system 0/ categories depicting the child'sconception 0/ learning

Learning to do

as doing

by getting older

by experience

" doing something/ incidentally

by doing ~ by practising

by perceiving

by thinking

Learning to know

Learning to understand

Figure 1: Structure partielle du systeme de categories decrivant les conceptionsque les en/ants ant de l'apprentissage

In Table 2 we can see how one third of the three-years-olds and most childrenfrom the age of four conceptualize the «what» aspect of learning in terms of learningto do. The idea of learning as learning to know is very infrequent at all pre-school

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE 37

ages, while a dramatic increase occurs after one year in primary school. Only a veryfew of the oldest children conceptualize the «what» aspect of learning as learningto understand.

The frequency is derived from the total number cf questions, i. e., if, for anyquestion, the child expressed a conception fitting into any of the categories, it wasmarked (and only once for each child).

Table 2: Children's conceptions of the «what» aspect of learning (0/0)

Age

Learning asbecoming able 3 4 5 6 7 8

to do 31 92 100 100 100 100to know 4 11 15 11 28

to understand 8

Note: Each subject may give from 1 to 3 responses.

Tableau 2: Conceptions des enjants sur «ce» qu'ils apprennent (%)

Having in mind the purpose of this article we shall now leave the conceptionsof learning to know and learning to understand and instead concentrate our intereston the conception learning to do. As we have seen, this category is the most commonamong children in these ages. If we now turn to the other aspect of learning, namely,how children perceive that they learn to do something, we have also found threequalitatively different categories of conceptions (see Figure 1).

At the first level children make no distinction between doing and learning, inother words, teaming and doing are more or less the same thing.

At the second level. where learning was referred to in terms of getting older,children have grasped that there is a difference between want to and can, whichwas not the case at the earlier level. The children express that they can do nothingbut wait until they reach the correct age for that particular skill, and then theskill will suddenly appear (e. g. «I will be able to ride my bike when I am f'ive»).

Finally, at the third level, children express learning as a consequence of differentkinds of experience. Experience, again, may have three distinctly different forms,namely, learning by doing, learning by perceiving and learning by thinking. Childrenexperiencing learning by doing associate the learning with being involved in orparticipating in an activity or situation (e. g. «I have learnt to count because I havea board at home and there are rings and I count on thern»), Children thinking oflearning in terms of perceiving attribute their learning to someone who shows, someonewho says or by media like books or TV (e. g. «I have learnt to build a house withLEGO by looking at a picture»), Finally, children attributing their learning tothinking, have an idea that their skill results from thinking (e. g. «I have made acar myself by thinking out how to put it together with nales»).

In Table 3 we can see how often these three main levels of conception (see Fi­gure 1, learning as doing, by getting older and by experience) were to be found amongthese children. About half of the children at the age of three and four still do not haveany conception of learning, they have not yet distinguished learning from doing.This conception decreases rapidly after the age of four. The conception of learning

38 1. PRAMLING

as a consequence of getting older increases at the earliest ages, to decrease again later.The conception of learning in the adult sense, namely via experience, can be seento a small extent among the three-year-olds, almost two-third of the four-year-oldsand every child over the age of five.

Table 3: Children's conceptions 0/ the «how» aspect 0/ learning (%)

Age

Learning 3 4 5 6 7 8

as doing 46 50 11 4by getting older 23 32 30 11 4 4

by experience 15 64 100 100 100 100

Note: Each subject may give from 1 to 3 responses.

Tableau 3: Conceptions des en/ants sur «comment» ils apprennent (%)

For this article we shall again delimit children's conceptions of how they learnto do something to the category of learning by experiencing. Within this category,We observed earlier that this could involve learning by doing, by perceiving or bythinking. But again we shall focus our attention on learning by doing (see the markedcategories in Figure 1). This means that the results that will be developed anddescribed here deal with children's conceptions of learning to do something by doing,which can be described in two qualitatively different ways. On the one hand, childrenexperience their own learning as learning something through practice, while, on theother hand, they experience this learning as learning to do something by doing itincidentally. These two conceptions of learning are seen as the idea of learningthrough practice and its predecessor from which it has been differentiated. First wewill elaborate children's ideas of learning as learning through doing somethingincidentally.

Learning something by doing it incidentally

Learning is experienced as the result of being involved in an activity. Whenit is possible to participate in different events, the skill of doing something will beacquired. The children's own role is very passive, they can do nothing to influencelearning. This does not mean that they are in fact passive, but their own initiativein learning is not apparent. They can only wait for opportunities, and as time elapsesthey will acquire the skill. As a consequence, many children said they were able todo something suddenly.

Victoria, 7 years 1 month.S: At the very beginning I had a very small bike with a support wheel

and then I got a new one like I have now ... at the start I had to havea helmet on in case I fell and hit my head and daddy was with meand helped me.

E: How did you know you could do it?S: I could... just suddenly.

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE 39

Pontus, 7 years 3 months.E: How did you go about learning to ride a bike?S: It was my big brother who taught me ... he held the carrier at the back

and then I biked after a while.

Robert, 6 years 6 months.E: If you get a new friend today and want to learn his phone number,

what would you do?S: Then I'd ask him and maybe he'd write it down on a piece of paper

and then I'd read it a lot of times when I call him, and then I'dknow it finally.

E: Would you be able to call him to-night if I wrote it down?S: No, it takes weeks, I have to call many times.

In this category, children focus on the time aspect of learning. To definelearning as a consequence of incidental activity means that the child can do nothingbut wait for learning opportunities to arise. By being repeatedly involved in thespecific activity, learning will come incidentally. This conception can be seen asreminiscent of the transition of experiencing learning as a consequence of gettingolder. In this case, however, the child knows that not only must time pass, but onemust also participate in an activity in order to learn. Thus learning comes incidentally.

With reference to one particular question, «How would you go about learninga phone number to a new friend ?», children with this conception do not think theycan rehearse the phone number and by doing so learn it. They have to call thefriend repeatedly over a long period of time, with a note in front of them beforethey learn the phone number by heart. This means that learning is embedded in time.This category can be seen as a forerunner of the child's idea of learning throughpractice, which will be elaborated on in the following. The idea of learning describedin this category has not been reported earlier, while the next one attracted theattention of Flavell (op. cit.).

Learning through. practice

Conceptions of how to learn as result of practising represent the children'sexperience of playing an active role themselves. Children refer to their own deliberatetraining or practice. For an idea to be categorized here, it is not sufficient for thechild to say: «You have to practise». The criterion used was that he or she hadeither to elaborate and explain what the practice referred to means, or to giveexamples which showed that he or she really understood his or her active role inlearning.

In this category the children have understood how they can decide what tolearn, as well as influence that learning actively over a period of time. Time can beallocated to practising the activity. The children no longer have to wait foropportunities,

Linda, 7 years 5 months.E: If you want to learn something you don't know, what do you do?S: You practise.E How do you go about practising?S: Well first, if you want to, for example, learn to walk on a tight-rope,

you maybe have it very low and then higher and higher each dayin ... and then finally you can do it.

40 I. PRAMLING

Christian, 7 years I month.E: But he wants to learn to run even faster. How does he go about that?S: He'll have to practise.E: How do you practise?S: You have to go out running almost every day. Then you get faster and

faster.

Mattias, 6 years 4 months.S: You can play it more times if you forget it.E: If you want to be very, very good at playing, what do you do?S: Practise.E: How do you go about practising?s: Play it over and over.

Children's concept of learning in this category shows an awareness of their ownrole by focusing on and «them-orienting» repetition of the activity. As far as learninga phone number is concerned they say it depends on rehearsal. Children who havethis level of understanding can decide to learn, a phone number, for instance.

We would maintain that the difference found here between children's under­standing of learning as a consequence of incidental activity, versus learning as aconsequence of practising that activity, represents a fundamental step in the develop­ment of consciousness of learning.

When something is learnt, action is embedded in time, but children focus hereeither on the aspect of time or the aspect of action. Both aspects are always present,but in the category of learning to do something incidentally, the time aspect constitutesthe figure while the activity aspect constitutes the background. Consequently, in thecategory of learning through practice, the activity aspect constitutes the figure, whilethe time aspect constitutes the background. This implies that when children experiencelearning through practising, they do not have to wait for time to elapse but canlearn with a purpose i. e. they have control over their own learning.

Comparison of the two conceptions

We consider that the most interesting finding presented in this article, is theidea of learning which can be seen as a predecessor of the idea of learning throughpractice. Both conceptions imply that the child views the acquisition of a skill asresult of having engaged in the relevant activity several times. But in the case ofthe first conception, this activity is embedded in time, in the flow of events. One hasto wait for the opportunity to engage in the activity again and again. When thechild has arrived at the second conceptualization, however, he or she realizes thatthe activity can be taken out of its everyday context, it can be separated from otherevents and one can engage in carrying it out on one's own initiative. The essentialdifference seems to be that in the first case one does something for another purposethan learning, learning is only a by-product. In the second case one engages in theactivity just in order to learn. Seeing an activity as primarily instrumental in relationto learning is, in our judgement, a distinguishing feature of the idea of learningthrough practice.

The other type of result is of a quantitative kind. The quantitative results referto the extent to which these categories are to be found at different levels ofdevelopment. The latter results will be dealt with here. 'Table 4 shows on the onehand, the number of children expressing the first conception only and, on the otherhand, those who expressing the second conception, or both.

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE 41

Table 4: Children's conceptions of «learning by experience» (n)

Age

Learning 4 5 6 7 8 Total

through incidentalactivity 12 18 8 3 1 42

through practice 1 9 18 25 25 78

Total 13 27 26 28 26 120

Tableau 4: Conceptions des en/ants sur «comment on apprend par experience» (n)

In cons:idering the two subcategories into which the conception of learningto do by doing was divided in Table 4, we find a clear developmental trend whencomparing the category of learning by doing something incidentally with the categoryof learning through practising. The number cf children who think of learning as aconsequence of doing something incidentally decreases steadily from the age of sixand upwards, while in the category representing children's ideas of learning in termsof practising, the number of children increases with age. The statistical analysisindicates there is a connection between age and category ( y. ~ = 49.22; d] = 4; p <.00001), which supports the assumption that understanding learning as a consequenceof one's own practice is a more advanced level of understanding than viewing learningas a result of incidental activity.

Twenty-nine children are missing from the above table. These are childrenwho did not understand learning as a result of experience, but expressed lower levelsof conception e. g. they associated their learning to getting older or to just doing(they have still not differentiated doing from learning). These are conceptionsmentioned but not developed in this article. From the number of children unable tounderstand learning as a consequence of experience either in the form of an incidentalaction or practising, we can see (Table 3) that it is the two youngest age-groupswho fail to understand learning in this way.

If the child does not express the idea of learning through practising, it probablydoes not exist for him or her, since it has been tested in relation to many differentskills or activities mentioned either by the child or by the interviewer. A frequentfollow-up question was: What would you do to be better, at swimming or running,etc? The child had many opportunities to indicate the idea of learning by practisingif he had this in mind.

By comparing these two conceptions we can see that there are not manychildren at the two oldest levels who only think that skills happen to them afterthey have been doing something incidentally, and consequently, that the oppositeapplies, that most of them have grasped that they have to practise to become ableto do something. But as pointed out earlier, this does not apply to all activities.

According to Piaget (1978) awareness originates from integration of observationsof the results and observations of the child's own action. The child becomes awarewhen he or she is able to combine and integrate actions and results. With regardto how children perceive learning, it seems to follow that in different activities ormanual skills, the action is observable, and because of this they fairly early becomeaware of their own active role in it. If we compare the child's awareness with adultstudents in Marton's (1975) study, who still think that by being involved in readingthe learning will happen to them, one has to find an explanation.

Intellectual learning is far more difficult to observe, which is perhaps thereason for these similarities between a passive and an active view in learning at thedifferent age levels.

42

Discussion

1. PRAMLlNG

The child's awareness of his or her own learning by doing something incidentallyor learning it through practising that activity shows two levels of awareness of hisor her own learning. It is obvious that most children from the age of five are awareof learning as a continuing process in which they have to be involved. But in thecategory of incidental learning all they can do is wait for opportunities to arrive,while in the category of practising they can create their own opportunities,

Awareness of one's own learning, and active involvement in learning, is animportant insight into learning in general. Brown (1978) points out that as long asyou are unaware of what you need to know, you are not likely to take strategicsteps to solve a problem properly. This phenomenon is also obvious in this study,since children who are aware of their own active involvement also, for example,believe that they can learn a new phone number during a short period of time sincethey know how to go about learning it by rehearsal.

If we interpret these two conceptions, there seems to be some evidence in theempirical data for a developmental trend in which one conception can be seen asmore advanced than other. The more advanced conception, where the child expe­riences learning through practising, does not entirely replace the other one. The lessadvanced conception, where children experience learning as the result of an incidentalactivity will, in other words, not disappear. This varies with the subject under thediscussion. A conception is not shown in an absolute way, but is related to what istalked about. That means that if we look at a single child, he or she may haveaccess to the conception of learning through an incidental action, while other childrenindicate that they have both ideas depending on what we talk about. Again otherchildren, whatever the content is, only talk about learning through practise. Butwe can see in Table 4 that there is a slight trend towards giving up the idea oflearning something by doing it incidentally with increasing age.

Looking at a particular question, the picture looks quite different from thetotal view. For example, only nine of the 26 8-year-oJd children understand that tolearn a phone number they can practise by repeat it over and over again. Thequestion is, therefore, very context-dependent. In other words, in relation to somelearning activities, children understand their own role in relation to others they donot. With respect to the child's realism in relation to making predictions, it isimportant what it is he or she makes a judgement about. Markman (1973) foundthat 5-year-old children could better predict their ability to jump various distancesthan they could predict their ability to make recalls. It is, in other words, easierfor children to make realistic predictions about types of behaviour than about theirmental activities. A more systematic comparison between children's conceptions ofdifferent learning tasks will not be made here, however, as it is beyond the scope.

When we claim that one conception is more advanced than the other, wedo not rely only on the frequency given in Table 4, but also on the whole sequenceor total picture of the investigation. A certain logic in the system can be seen,where the child's understanding of his or her own role in learning gradually dominatesall the aspects of learning. The idea of learning by doing something incidentallyis a more global conception, where the doing is embodied in the daily life of thechild without the child being able to influence it. When the child understands learningsomething through practice, he or she has differentiated practising from other activitiesin life. This can be seen as an example of the ortogenetic principle which Werner(Barton & Franklin, 1978) uses to define development as an increasing differentiationof the components in the symbolic situation and also as an integrative systematizationof the symbolic forms. From the beginning, the child's world is an undistinguishedwhole, which with increasing age and maturity becomes more and more differentiated.

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE 43

Kreutzer et al. (1975) have asked the question: «What do you do when youwant to remember a phone number?». Most children up to third grade in school(8-year-olds) said they would write it down. Kreutzer states that the idea that onecan store a number to be remembered exactly by writing it down seems fairly wellunderstood even by children of pre-school age, while only four children out of 60up to third grade suggested any kind of rehearsal.

In this study, we see that there are far more children able to suggest rehearsalin relation to learning a phone number than in Kreutzer's study. This is probablydue to the fact that we have not been satisfied with children saying: «I would writethe number down on a note». We then continued to ask whether there was anyway to learn so they could make the call without the note being there, and so forth.

Educational implications

Everyday that comes is a new experience for children, providing them with newacquisitions, skills or knowledge in the domain of cognition. During the learningprocess some metacognitive aspect is also in operation, in the sense that childrenmay become: aware of their acquisition of skills or knowledge, in the same way asthere is a distinction between having knowledge and the understanding of one'spossession of that knowledge (Brown, 1978). Since Pia get's (1975) careful examinationof children's thinking about their own thinking, interest in the field of metacognitionhas risen sharply in recent years (Flavell, 1977, 1979; Brown, 1980; Brown &Smily, 1977).

Research results have now indicated that there is a connection between children'srnetacognitive awareness (of which awareness of learning is a particular case) andthe ability to benefit from teaching in school. The utmost educational importanceof the learner's awareness of learning, i. e. awareness of the fact that he/she islearning, how he/she is learning, and what he/she is learning (see e. g. Weinstein &Underwood, 1985; Biggs, in press), has been shown most convincingly.

Francis (1982) observed a group of children through out their first year atschool, and described how children tend to set about the task of learning - to readand write, each in his or her way. She distinguishes three categories of readers, theskilled readers, the slow readers and the late beginners.

The skilled readers have grasped some understanding of reading and writing.These children make an active attempt at reading and listening, take part in dialogues,are able to question and consider alternatives and to give some thematic account ofevents. The slow readers perceive that reading and writing have something to dowith beginning school, something that can be done or not, and do not see these asconstantly developing skills, or as abilities to be valued throughout life. The latebeginners are children who give no indication of reading at all during the first yearin school and still have great difficulty in reading after three years. It is a characteristicof these children that they have no understanding of what reading and writing areabout. They in fact learn to perceive and copy patterns without understanding. Somechildren neither grasp why they are in school nor the idea of reading and writing.These children are the poorest learners.

Dahlgren & Olsson (1985) show, in a study on the child's conception of reading,that some children in the pre-school environment perceive learning to read as apositive opportunity, while other children perceive the same learning as a demandfrom the environment and anxiety-related. After one year in school children aretested for their reading abilities. 22 out of 28 children who have a conception oflearning to read as a demand from the environment also have very considerablereading and writing problems.

44 1. PRAMLING

In the same way as Siiljo (1982) showed that the students' conceptions oflearning and their own role in it influenced what they learn from the text, in ourstudy we found a similar distinction among children of pre-school age, namely adistinction between the child's own role as active or passive. But what we havefound here is probably «embryo» of the idea, and the first way of experiencing activeinvolvement. To become able to differentiate is important in the child's cognitivedevelopment (Werner, op. cit.), This means that as long as the child has notdifferentiated and integrated what the importance of their own role in learning anactivity means, they most probably do not understand that the activity in itself canbe differentiated and thus practised.

Some fairly successful studies also exist where there has been an attempt todevelop children's metacognitive awareness, i. e. their awareness of their strategies inlearning (see e. g. Paris, Cross & Lipson, 1984; Forrest-Pressly & Waller, 1984).Brown & Campione (1978) have shown that by training metacognitive skills such as,checking, planning, self-testing, etc. with retarded children who often lack these skills,these children become able to generalize these skills and utilize them in new learningtasks after one year. Metacognitive awareness in this case was a goal in itself.

Biggs (in press) means that one should not work with metacognitive skills, butrather with teaching cognitive skills metacognitively. The difference between thesetwo views, as far as I understand, is that when teachers work with teachingmetacognitive skills, the metacognitive skills are focussed on as such. If we look atteaching cognitive skills metacognitively, the content is not the skills as such buthow to teach a content by focussing on other aspects or by taking another approachto the content. This means that the learner has to think about how to learn a parti­cular content, by reflecting about it.

To teach cognitive skills is not, in our view, a question of teaching generalthinking skills, but to get the child to reflect about the content, or in this case, abouttheir own learning. Invaluable benefit could be gained from influencing children tothink about what teachers to a large extent take for granted, that is, that we learnto do things by practising or that we have an active role in learning.

If we believe that learning is not merely a question of supplying the «correct»answer, but a question of helping the child to progress from one type of understandingto a qualitatively different type of understanding of various phenomena, we have tobegin with and accept the way the child itself thinks and try to get him or her toreflect about his or her way of thinking in relation to the content.

If one accept Kail's (op. cit.) conclusion that children make no mnemonicstrategies before they are aware of them, or the statement of Francis (op, cit.) andDahlgren & Olsson's (op. cit.) who claim that children's conceptions of school, aswell as subject-matter, influence what they learn there, children would be betterlearners if they became aware of their own role in learning. The present investigationcan be seen as illuminating one of the very first steps in the development of suchan awareness.

References.

Barton, S. & Franklin, M. (Eds). (1978). Developmental processes. Heinz Werner's Selected Writings.(Vol. 2.). New York: International University Press.

Brown, A. (1978). Knowing when, where and how to remember: A problem of metacognition. InR. Glaser (Ed.) Advances in instructional psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Brown, A. (1980). Metacognitive development and reading. In J. Spiro, B. Bruce & W. Bremer,(Eds), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension. (pp. 453-481). Hillsdale, NJ: LawrenceErlbaum.

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE 45

Brown, A. & Campione, J. (1978). Training general metacognitive skills in retarded children.In M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris & R. N. Sykes (Eels), Practical aspects of memory.London: Academic Press.

Brown, A. & Smily, S. (1977). Rating the importance of structural units of prose passages:A problem of metacognitive development. Child Development, 48, 1-8.

Dahlgren, G. & Olsson, L. E. (1985). Liisning ur barnperspektiv, Goteborg: Acta UniversitatisGothenborgensis. (The child's conception of reading).

Doverborg, E. & Pramling, 1. (1985). A It [orsta barns tankar. Stockholm: Liber. (Understandingchildren's thinking).

Flavell, J. (1977). Cognitive development. Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice HaIl.

Flavell, J. (1979). Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911.

Forrest-Pressley, D. L. & Waller, T. G. (1984). Cognition, Metacognition, and Reading. New York:Springer-Verlag.

Francis, H. (1982). Learning to read. London: George AIIen & Unwin.

Glaser, B. & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. New York: Aldine PublishingCompany.

Holt, J. (1980;. How children learn. Reading: Cox & Wyman Ltd.

Johansson, B., Marton, F. & Svensson, L. (1985). An approach to describing learning as changebetween qualitatively different conceptions. In L. H. T. West & A. C. Pines (Eds), Cognitivestructure and conceptual change. Orlando, F1: Academic Press.

Kail, R. (1979). The development of memory. San Francisco: Freeman.

Kreutzer, M. A., Leonard, S. C. & Flavell, J. (1975). An interview-study of children's knowledgeabout memory. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. No 159,40 (I).

Markman, E. (1973). Factors affecting the young child's ability to monitor his memory. Unpublisheddoctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Marton, F. (1975). What does it takes to learn. In N. Entwistle & D. Hounsell (Eds.) How studentslearn (pp. 125-138). Lancaster: IPCE.

Marton, F. (1981). Phenomenography - describing conceptions of the world around us. InstructionalScience, 10, 177-200.

Marton, F. (in press). Phenomenography - a research approach to investigate different understandingof reality. In D. Petterman (Ed.), A shift in allegiance: The use of qualitative data and itsrelevance for policy.

Marton, F. & Sal]o, R. (1985). Approaches to learning. In F. Marton, D. Hounsell & N. Entwistle.(Eds.), The Experience of learning. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

Paris, S. G., Cross, D. R. & Lipson, M. Y. (1984). Informed Strategies for Learning: A Programmeto Improve Children's Reading Awareness and Comprehension. Journal of Educational Psy­chology, 76, 1239-1252.

Piagct, J. (1975). The child's conception of the world. New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams & Co.

Piaget, J. (1978). Success and understanding. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Pramling, I. (1983). The child's conception of learning. Goteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothenborgensis.

Stevenson, H. (1972). Children's learning. New York: Meredith.

Saljo, R. (1982). Learning and understanding. Goteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothenborgensis.

Werner, H. (1959). Comparative psychology of mental development. New York: International Uni-versity Press.

Weinstein, C. E. & Underwood, V. L. (1985). Learning Strategies: The How of learning. InJ. W. Segal, S. F. Chipman & R. Glaser. (Eds), Thinking and learning skills. London: LawrenceErlbaum,

46 1. PRAMLING

L'evolution des idees des enfants sur l'activited'apprentissage

Aiin de rechercher d'eventuelles differences quolitativesdans les conceptions que les en/ants ont de leurs propres pro­cessus d'acquisition, 149 sujets de 3 a 8 ans ont ere interregesen ecole maternelle. L'un des resultats les plus nets concerne laconscience croissante chez l'eniant du role de son activite propredans l'apprentissage, Il ressort notamment qu'avant que l'enjantconceive ses acquisitions comme Ie resultat de l'exercice inten­tionnel, it met ses nouvelles capacites sur Ie compte d'uneactivite incidente pratiqaee de [aeon non systematique.

Key words: Developmental psychology, instruction, pre-school context, qualitativeresearch.

Received: November 18. 1985Revision received: May 29, 1986

Ingrid Pramling. Department of Education and Educational Research, University of Goteborg,Box 1010, 431 26 Malndal, Sweden

Current theme of research:

Metacognition in the context of pre-school.

Most relevant publications in the field of Educational Psychology:

Pramling, I. (1983). The child's conception of learning. G6teborg: Acta Universitatis Gothenborgensis.