-
Title
-
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children's Academic Achievement
-
Author
-
Geary, David C.
-
Berch, Daniel B.
-
Research Area
-
Development
-
Topic
-
Evolutionary Bases of Development
-
Abstract
-
There are evolved cognitive biases that influence what people pay attention to (e.g., faces, not rocks) and how they interpret this information (e.g., underlying intentions). These cognitive biases are organized to help us understand ourselves and other people (folk psychology), other species (folk biology), and the physical world (folk physics). Human cultural advances have resulted in the development of evolutionarily novel concepts (e.g., natural selection) and skills (e.g., reading) that are built from this evolved core. The basic architecture of folk cognitive biases is universal and adapted to nuances in local conditions as children play, interact with other people, and explore the environment. The learning of evolutionarily novel competencies is necessary for success in today's economy but children do not learn these as easily as they adapt folk knowledge nor are they as motivated to engage in the associated activities. This is because learning academic competencies requires adapting folk systems for tasks for which they did not evolve. The associated activities (e.g., direct instruction) are very different from the activities (e.g., play) that foster the adaptation of folk abilities to local conditions. Schooling thus involves the society‐wide organization of children's activities so they learn competencies that would not otherwise emerge. This perspective allows us to better understand the importance of working memory, a motivational focus on effort, and the need for explicit, organized instruction for children's learning in school.
-
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Identifier
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etrds0123
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extracted text
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Evolutionary Approaches to
Understanding Children’s
Academic Achievement
DAVID C. GEARY and DANIEL B. BERCH
Abstract
There are evolved cognitive biases that influence what people pay attention to (e.g.,
faces, not rocks) and how they interpret this information (e.g., underlying intentions). These cognitive biases are organized to help us understand ourselves and
other people (folk psychology), other species (folk biology), and the physical world
(folk physics). Human cultural advances have resulted in the development of evolutionarily novel concepts (e.g., natural selection) and skills (e.g., reading) that are built
from this evolved core. The basic architecture of folk cognitive biases is universal and
adapted to nuances in local conditions as children play, interact with other people,
and explore the environment. The learning of evolutionarily novel competencies is
necessary for success in today’s economy but children do not learn these as easily
as they adapt folk knowledge nor are they as motivated to engage in the associated
activities. This is because learning academic competencies requires adapting folk systems for tasks for which they did not evolve. The associated activities (e.g., direct
instruction) are very different from the activities (e.g., play) that foster the adaptation
of folk abilities to local conditions. Schooling thus involves the society-wide organization of children’s activities so they learn competencies that would not otherwise
emerge. This perspective allows us to better understand the importance of working
memory, a motivational focus on effort, and the need for explicit, organized instruction for children’s learning in school.
INTRODUCTION
Darwin’s (1859) natural selection is the organizing framework for all of the
biological sciences, and yet many social and educational scientists continue to
ignore or actively resist the insights that can be achieved by viewing human
behavior and cognition from an evolutionary lens. Focusing the evolutionary
lens on children’s learning and motivation in school has great potential to
expand our understanding of these processes and to develop better ways to
ensure that children are well prepared for the demands of living in today’s
modern world. We provide a brief introduction to evolutionary educational
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
psychology, and then highlight current research efforts in the field and issues
that remain to be addressed.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The foundational insight is that there are critical differences between what
children have evolved to easily learn in natural environments and what they
are expected to learn in school (Geary, 1995). The distinction is important
because nearly all of school-taught academic material is evolutionarily novel
in that these were developed only recently; in fact formal schooling is an
evolutionary novel cultural innovation (Geary, 2007). Universal schooling
is necessary because navigating life in the modern world requires learning
the novel skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, to name only the basics.
If children learned these skills as easily as they learn language or how to
interpret the facial expressions of other people, for instance, formal schooling
would not be necessary.
To understand evolutionarily novel or biologically secondary competencies, it is first necessary to understand the evolved or biologically primary
foundation upon which these are built. This foundation of core domains coalesces around folk psychology, folk biology, and folk physics (Atran, 1998;
Gallistel, 1990; R. Gelman, 1990; S. Gelman, 2003; Pinker, 1994), as shown in
Figure 1. These are universal in that humans have an inherent bias to process
and organize information in these domains, although the extent to which
they are elaborated and aspects of the surface features (e.g., language) of the
domain can vary across cultures.
Folk psychology is organized around the self, other individuals, and group
dynamics. The first includes awareness of the self as a social being and of
one’s relationships with other people. The individual-level system processes
information that guides one-on-one social dynamics and supports dyadic
relationships. The group-level systems enable individuals to break their
social world into categories of people. Folk biology supports the ability to
develop taxonomies of other species and acquire knowledge about these
species that is critical to the survival of people in traditional societies. Folk
physics enables navigation, generation of mental representations of physical
space, the construction of tools, and an implicit understanding of magnitude
and time.
EVOLUTION AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Children are biologically prepared to learn in folk domains and are inherently
motivated—for example, the “fun” associated with peer play is an evolved
reward that ensures engagement in these activities—to seek out experiences
3
Self
schema
Noverbal
behavior
Facial
expression
Language
Individual
Theory
of
mind
Person
schema
Kin
In-group
Out-group
Group
Group
schema:
ideology
Essence
Flora
Folk biology
Fauna
Movement
Represent
Folk physics
Ecological information
Tool
use
Figure 1 Biologically primary folk domains. Source: Adapted from “The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general
intelligence,” by D. G. Geary, 2005, p. 129. Copyright 2005 by American Psychological Association.
Self
awareness
Self
Folk psychology
Social information
Information-processing
domains
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
that will facilitate the fleshing out and adapting of folk knowledge to local
conditions (R. Gelman, 1990; Scarr, 1992). Play, social interactions, and exploration of the environment and objects appear to be the ways in which children
generate the experiences that result in this adaption. Children are neither
explicitly aware they are learning about the social, biological, and physical
world as they play nor do they need to engage in effortful processing for this
learning to occur.
COGNITIVE AND ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT
Humans clearly have the ability to create and learn evolutionarily novel
concepts and skills, but this does not come as easily as fleshing out folk
competencies (Geary, 2005). One reason is that the skeletal structure of
folk systems is essentially implicit knowledge about core aspects of these
domains. Infants orient and react to other humans, not because they are
explicitly aware that they are members of the same species but because
folk systems include features that are sensitive to human biological motion,
human facial features, and so on. There is no corresponding knowledge
for understanding the base-10 Arabic number system. Another reason is
that folk domains will allocate attention to key features of the context, as
in making eye contact during a conversation. When first exposed to books,
toddlers sitting in their parents’ lap do not automatically attend to the words
their parents are reading to them. Finally, almost all children are motivated
to engage in activities that will flesh out folk competencies. A universal
motivation to engage in the activities that will result in mastery of academic
domains is not likely. Many children will attempt to emulate adults’ and
older children’s reading, but this will not result in the basic word decoding
skills needed to actually read. Many people will read for its own sake,
but this is driven by interest in the content of what is being read—often
evolutionarily salient social themes—and not the act of reading itself.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Recent research and theoretical advances concerning both the implications
of an evolutionary perspective for instructional science and the evolutionary origins of pedagogy are likely to shape future approaches to improving
children’s academic achievement.
COGNITIVE LOAD THEORY OF INSTRUCTION
Although the evolutionary perspective is not ready for direct translation
into school curricula, it can be used to generate testable hypotheses about
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
5
the potential effectiveness of alternative instructional methods (Geary, 2008).
That said, it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of empirical studies in instructional science have not been informed by evolutionary premises
or principles. A notable exception has been the work of John Sweller and
colleagues, whose studies of effective instructional strategies are founded on
cognitive load theory (CLT), which espouses an evolutionary perspective.
A predominant approach to the design of instructional techniques, CLT
claims that human cognitive architecture and the manner by which both
its structures and functions have evolved are analogous to the evolution of
biological structures and functions (Sweller, 2004). A central tenet is that
the limited capacity and duration of working memory constrains learners’
acquisition of novel information. Consequently, a fundamental instructional
objective of CLT is to develop techniques for reducing working memory
load during learning.
Until recently, it has been assumed that the capacity limitations of working
memory apply to the acquisition of all information (Paas & Sweller, 2012).
However, building upon the important distinction between biologically primary and biologically secondary knowledge, Paas and Sweller (2012) have
recently amended this perspective. They point out that because humans have
evolved to process biologically primary information, the demands made on
working memory during this processing are minimized. This is not the case
with the learning of biologically secondary information, which is normally
difficult to acquire owing to the sizeable working memory load imposed by
this kind of information, especially during initial learning.
The authors provide several examples of how biologically primary
information can be of assistance when a learner is acquiring biologically
secondary skills, accounting for a number of demonstrated instructional
effects. One interesting example is the “modality effect.” Numerous studies
have shown that instructional formats using two sensory modalities yield
learning superior to equivalent formats that use only a single modality. For
example, studying a pictured (visually presented) object accompanied by a
spoken (auditorily presented) description yields better learning than when
the pictured object is described by written (visually presented) text. The
classic explanation for this outcome based on CLT is that working memory
capacity is increased by using two different sensory channels as compared
with only one. However, from an evolutionary perspective, this enhanced
learning of a biologically secondary skill may be more appropriately
attributed to the assistance of biologically primary skills. That is, the use of
this kind of dual-mode instructional approach is beneficial because humans
have evolved to listen to a description of an object while looking at it, not to
read a description of it (a biologically secondary skill itself) while looking at
it (Paas & Sweller, 2012).
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
THE EVOLUTIONARY PRECURSORS OF TEACHING
Some exciting theoretical developments have emerged over the past several
years regarding the evolutionary history of pedagogy itself. For example,
Csibra and Gergely (2009, 2011) have hypothesized that a type of human
communication they call natural pedagogy arose during hominin evolution
to facilitate the transmission of generic technological knowledge and skills
between individuals. This adaptation is proposed to have evolved to enable
“fast and efficient social learning of cognitively opaque cultural knowledge
that would be hard to acquire relying on purely observational learning mechanisms alone” (2009, p. 148). Furthermore, according to Tehrani and Riede
(2008), a review of the archaeological record suggests that pedagogy has been
vital for accurately transmitting skills across generations. In contrast, after
reviewing the ethnographic record of traditional societies, Lancy (2010) concluded, “Teaching has been largely superfluous in the process of cultural
transmission throughout human history” (p. 97). Although Sterelny (2012)
agrees that the role of teaching was frequently quite limited in traditional
societies, he also points out that “adults can and do structure and engineer
the learning environment, even without explicit teaching” (p. 36).
A recent review of these and other perspectives on the evolution and
ontogeny of teaching has led some researchers to conclude that teaching is
both species typical—universal across cultures—and species unique, that
is, not evident in nonhuman species (Strauss & Ziv, 2012). Of course, these
conclusions depend in part on how one defines teaching. For example, a
definition based on cognitive components stipulates that teaching is an
intentional activity for increasing the understanding of another who is
judged (via a so-called theory of mind) to either lack knowledge or possess
a false belief (Ziv & Frye, 2004). Certainly, adopting such a definition would
rule out nonhuman animals as being capable of teaching. Nonetheless,
the point here is that an evolutionary perspective can inform the study
of proximate or immediate factors that influence the development and
acquisition of teaching skills, and thus may yield unique insights into how
humans have evolved to transmit (teach), as well as learn, novel culturally
important information.
KEY ISSUES
Children’s natural interest in novelty and their motivation to learn their
culture may get them started in school but is not likely to maintain long-term
academic learning. One possibility may be to capitalize on the fuzzy boundary between primary and secondary domains during the early years of
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
7
schooling and children’s motivation to learn culturally important knowledge and to use these to build academic self-efficacy and other beliefs that
will help to maintain effort in school learning in later years.
There may be an excess reliance on “internal” motivation for academic
learning, at the expense of focusing on the utility of the learning. If we
assume that children are inherently motivated to learn in academic domains
and learn as effortlessly as they learn in folk domains, then we risk undervaluing the importance of focus and effort for secondary learning. Without
an explicit assumption that learning will require effort, we put children at
risk for making attributions (e.g., they do not have the ability to learn the
material) that may undermine their engagement with school when academic
material becomes difficult.
CONCLUSION
An evolutionary approach to children’s academic learning and motivation
in school can explain why learning to read is more difficult than learning a
native language, among many other primary–secondary contrasts (Geary,
2007), and why many children are more motivated to socialize with their
friends than to learn algebra. This perspective has profound implications
for how to design instruction to address these differences and to better
understand and address the motivational and attributional (e.g., that
learning requires effort) factors that will influence long-term engagement in
academic learning.
REFERENCES
Atran, S. (1998). Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals
and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 547–609.
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2009). Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13,
148–153.
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2011). Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 1149–1157.
Darwin, C. (1859). The origin of species by means of natural selection (6th ed.). London,
England: John Murray.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The organization of learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/
Bradford Books.
Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children’s cognition:
Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psychologist, 50, 24–37.
Geary, D. C. (2005). The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Geary, D. C. (2007). Educating the evolved mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating
the evolved mind (Vol. 2, Psychological perspectives on contemporary educational
issues, pp. 1–99). Greenwich, CT: Information Age.
Geary, D. C. (2008). An evolutionarily informed education science. Educational Psychologist, 43, 279–295.
Gelman, R. (1990). First principles organize attention to and learning about relevant
data: Number and animate-inanimate distinction as examples. Cognitive Science,
14, 79–106.
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lancy, D. F. (2010). Learning “from nobody”: The limited role of teaching in folk
models of children’s development. Childhood in the Past, 3, 79–106.
Paas, F., & Sweller, J. (2012). An evolutionary upgrade of cognitive load theory: Using
the human motor system and collaboration to support the learning of complex
cognitive tasks. Educational Psychology Review, 24, 27–45.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York, NY: William Morrow.
Scarr, S. (1992). Developmental theories of the 1990s: Developmental and individual
differences. Child Development, 63, 1–19.
Sterelny, K. (2012). The evolved apprentice: How evolution made humans unique. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Strauss, S., & Ziv, M. (2012). Teaching is a natural cognitive ability for humans. Mind,
Brain, and Education, 6, 186–196.
Sweller, J. (2004). Instructional design consequences of an analogy between evolution
by natural selection and human cognitive architecture. Instructional Science, 32,
9–31.
Tehrani, J. J., & Riede, F. (2008). Towards an archaeology of pedagogy: Learning,
teaching and the generation of material culture traditions. World Archaeology, 40,
316–331.
Ziv, M., & Frye, D. (2004). Children’s understanding of teaching: The role of knowledge and belief. Cognitive Development, 19, 457–477.
DAVID C. GEARY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. David C. Geary received a BS in psychology from Santa Clara University,
an MS in child clinical/school psychology from California State University,
and an MA and PhD in developmental psychology from the University of
California, Riverside. Upon completion of his PhD in 1986, he held faculty
positions at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Missouri, first at the Science and Technology campus and then in Columbia. Dr.
Geary served as chair of his department from 2002 to 2005 and as the University of Missouri’s Middlebush Professor of Psychological Sciences from 2000
to 2003. He is currently a Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Fellow.
He has published nearly 250 articles, commentaries, and chapters across a
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
9
wide range of topics, including three sole-authored books; Children’s mathematical development, Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences (now
in second edition, 2010), and The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition,
and general intelligence as well as one co-authored book, Sex differences: Summarizing more than a century of scientific research. He served as a member of
the President’s National (US) Mathematics Advisory Panel and Chaired the
Learning Processes subcommittee, is a recipient of a MERIT award from the
National Institutes of Health, and was appointed by President G. W. Bush
to the National Board of Directors for the Institute for Education Sciences.
He currently directs NIH- and NSF-funded studies on young children’s and
adolescents’ mathematical cognition and learning, as well as various projects
in evolutionary psychology.
Web page: http://web.missouri.edu/∼gearyd/
DANIEL B. BERCH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Daniel B. Berch is Professor of Educational Psychology and Applied
Developmental Science at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of
Education. Before this position, he was Associate Dean for Research and
Faculty Development at the Curry School. Before coming to the University
of Virginia, Dr. Berch served as Associate Chief of the Child Development
and Behavior Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, NIH. His previous federal service included a year spent as
a Senior Research Associate at the US Department of Education, advising
the Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement. Dr.
Berch has published articles on children’s numerical cognition and mathematical learning disabilities, and is senior editor of the book, Why is Math
So Hard For Some Children? The Nature and Origins of Mathematical Learning
Difficulties and Disabilities. Among other honors, he received the NIH Award
of Merit, was elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association’s
Division of Experimental Psychology, served as an ex officio member of
the US Department of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel
commissioned by President George W. Bush, and currently serves as a
member of the Evolution Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board. For the
past several years, Dr. Berch has been working on the implications of
evolutionary theory for educational research and practice, publishing a book
chapter on instructing evolved minds and serving as one of the Evolution
Institute’s primary organizers of a 2013 conference on evolutionary perspectives in education research funded by the American Educational Research
Association.
Web page: http://curry.virginia.edu/academics/directory/daniel-b.-berch
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
RELATED ESSAYS
Economics of Early Education (Economics), W. Steven Barnett
Kin-Directed Behavior in Primates (Anthropology), Carol M. Berman
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development (Psychology), Jondou Chen and
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Genetics and the Life Course (Sociology), Evan Charney
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
Social Class and Parental Investment in Children (Sociology), Anne H.
Gauthier
Changing Family Patterns (Sociology), Kathleen Gerson and Stacy Torres
Language and Thought (Psychology), Susan Goldin-Meadow
Family Relationships and Development (Psychology), Joan E. Grusec
Genetics and Social Behavior (Anthropology), Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran
An Evolutionary Perspective on Developmental Plasticity (Psychology),
Sarah Hartman and Jay Belsky
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Childhood (Anthropology), Karen L. Kramer
Two-Systems View of Children’s Theory-of-Mind Understanding (Psychology), Jason Low
Evolutionary Perspectives on Animal and Human Personality (Anthropology), Joseph H. Manson and Lynn A. Fairbanks
Neural and Cognitive Plasticity (Psychology), Eduardo Mercado III
A Bio-Social-Cultural Approach to Early Cognitive Development: Entering
the Community of Minds (Psychology), Katherine Nelson
How Form Constrains Function in the Human Brain (Psychology), Timothy
D. Verstynen
Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman
Behavioral Heterochrony (Anthropology), Victoria Wobber and Brian Hare
-
Evolutionary Approaches to
Understanding Children’s
Academic Achievement
DAVID C. GEARY and DANIEL B. BERCH
Abstract
There are evolved cognitive biases that influence what people pay attention to (e.g.,
faces, not rocks) and how they interpret this information (e.g., underlying intentions). These cognitive biases are organized to help us understand ourselves and
other people (folk psychology), other species (folk biology), and the physical world
(folk physics). Human cultural advances have resulted in the development of evolutionarily novel concepts (e.g., natural selection) and skills (e.g., reading) that are built
from this evolved core. The basic architecture of folk cognitive biases is universal and
adapted to nuances in local conditions as children play, interact with other people,
and explore the environment. The learning of evolutionarily novel competencies is
necessary for success in today’s economy but children do not learn these as easily
as they adapt folk knowledge nor are they as motivated to engage in the associated
activities. This is because learning academic competencies requires adapting folk systems for tasks for which they did not evolve. The associated activities (e.g., direct
instruction) are very different from the activities (e.g., play) that foster the adaptation
of folk abilities to local conditions. Schooling thus involves the society-wide organization of children’s activities so they learn competencies that would not otherwise
emerge. This perspective allows us to better understand the importance of working
memory, a motivational focus on effort, and the need for explicit, organized instruction for children’s learning in school.
INTRODUCTION
Darwin’s (1859) natural selection is the organizing framework for all of the
biological sciences, and yet many social and educational scientists continue to
ignore or actively resist the insights that can be achieved by viewing human
behavior and cognition from an evolutionary lens. Focusing the evolutionary
lens on children’s learning and motivation in school has great potential to
expand our understanding of these processes and to develop better ways to
ensure that children are well prepared for the demands of living in today’s
modern world. We provide a brief introduction to evolutionary educational
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
psychology, and then highlight current research efforts in the field and issues
that remain to be addressed.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The foundational insight is that there are critical differences between what
children have evolved to easily learn in natural environments and what they
are expected to learn in school (Geary, 1995). The distinction is important
because nearly all of school-taught academic material is evolutionarily novel
in that these were developed only recently; in fact formal schooling is an
evolutionary novel cultural innovation (Geary, 2007). Universal schooling
is necessary because navigating life in the modern world requires learning
the novel skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, to name only the basics.
If children learned these skills as easily as they learn language or how to
interpret the facial expressions of other people, for instance, formal schooling
would not be necessary.
To understand evolutionarily novel or biologically secondary competencies, it is first necessary to understand the evolved or biologically primary
foundation upon which these are built. This foundation of core domains coalesces around folk psychology, folk biology, and folk physics (Atran, 1998;
Gallistel, 1990; R. Gelman, 1990; S. Gelman, 2003; Pinker, 1994), as shown in
Figure 1. These are universal in that humans have an inherent bias to process
and organize information in these domains, although the extent to which
they are elaborated and aspects of the surface features (e.g., language) of the
domain can vary across cultures.
Folk psychology is organized around the self, other individuals, and group
dynamics. The first includes awareness of the self as a social being and of
one’s relationships with other people. The individual-level system processes
information that guides one-on-one social dynamics and supports dyadic
relationships. The group-level systems enable individuals to break their
social world into categories of people. Folk biology supports the ability to
develop taxonomies of other species and acquire knowledge about these
species that is critical to the survival of people in traditional societies. Folk
physics enables navigation, generation of mental representations of physical
space, the construction of tools, and an implicit understanding of magnitude
and time.
EVOLUTION AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Children are biologically prepared to learn in folk domains and are inherently
motivated—for example, the “fun” associated with peer play is an evolved
reward that ensures engagement in these activities—to seek out experiences
3
Self
schema
Noverbal
behavior
Facial
expression
Language
Individual
Theory
of
mind
Person
schema
Kin
In-group
Out-group
Group
Group
schema:
ideology
Essence
Flora
Folk biology
Fauna
Movement
Represent
Folk physics
Ecological information
Tool
use
Figure 1 Biologically primary folk domains. Source: Adapted from “The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general
intelligence,” by D. G. Geary, 2005, p. 129. Copyright 2005 by American Psychological Association.
Self
awareness
Self
Folk psychology
Social information
Information-processing
domains
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
that will facilitate the fleshing out and adapting of folk knowledge to local
conditions (R. Gelman, 1990; Scarr, 1992). Play, social interactions, and exploration of the environment and objects appear to be the ways in which children
generate the experiences that result in this adaption. Children are neither
explicitly aware they are learning about the social, biological, and physical
world as they play nor do they need to engage in effortful processing for this
learning to occur.
COGNITIVE AND ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT
Humans clearly have the ability to create and learn evolutionarily novel
concepts and skills, but this does not come as easily as fleshing out folk
competencies (Geary, 2005). One reason is that the skeletal structure of
folk systems is essentially implicit knowledge about core aspects of these
domains. Infants orient and react to other humans, not because they are
explicitly aware that they are members of the same species but because
folk systems include features that are sensitive to human biological motion,
human facial features, and so on. There is no corresponding knowledge
for understanding the base-10 Arabic number system. Another reason is
that folk domains will allocate attention to key features of the context, as
in making eye contact during a conversation. When first exposed to books,
toddlers sitting in their parents’ lap do not automatically attend to the words
their parents are reading to them. Finally, almost all children are motivated
to engage in activities that will flesh out folk competencies. A universal
motivation to engage in the activities that will result in mastery of academic
domains is not likely. Many children will attempt to emulate adults’ and
older children’s reading, but this will not result in the basic word decoding
skills needed to actually read. Many people will read for its own sake,
but this is driven by interest in the content of what is being read—often
evolutionarily salient social themes—and not the act of reading itself.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Recent research and theoretical advances concerning both the implications
of an evolutionary perspective for instructional science and the evolutionary origins of pedagogy are likely to shape future approaches to improving
children’s academic achievement.
COGNITIVE LOAD THEORY OF INSTRUCTION
Although the evolutionary perspective is not ready for direct translation
into school curricula, it can be used to generate testable hypotheses about
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
5
the potential effectiveness of alternative instructional methods (Geary, 2008).
That said, it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of empirical studies in instructional science have not been informed by evolutionary premises
or principles. A notable exception has been the work of John Sweller and
colleagues, whose studies of effective instructional strategies are founded on
cognitive load theory (CLT), which espouses an evolutionary perspective.
A predominant approach to the design of instructional techniques, CLT
claims that human cognitive architecture and the manner by which both
its structures and functions have evolved are analogous to the evolution of
biological structures and functions (Sweller, 2004). A central tenet is that
the limited capacity and duration of working memory constrains learners’
acquisition of novel information. Consequently, a fundamental instructional
objective of CLT is to develop techniques for reducing working memory
load during learning.
Until recently, it has been assumed that the capacity limitations of working
memory apply to the acquisition of all information (Paas & Sweller, 2012).
However, building upon the important distinction between biologically primary and biologically secondary knowledge, Paas and Sweller (2012) have
recently amended this perspective. They point out that because humans have
evolved to process biologically primary information, the demands made on
working memory during this processing are minimized. This is not the case
with the learning of biologically secondary information, which is normally
difficult to acquire owing to the sizeable working memory load imposed by
this kind of information, especially during initial learning.
The authors provide several examples of how biologically primary
information can be of assistance when a learner is acquiring biologically
secondary skills, accounting for a number of demonstrated instructional
effects. One interesting example is the “modality effect.” Numerous studies
have shown that instructional formats using two sensory modalities yield
learning superior to equivalent formats that use only a single modality. For
example, studying a pictured (visually presented) object accompanied by a
spoken (auditorily presented) description yields better learning than when
the pictured object is described by written (visually presented) text. The
classic explanation for this outcome based on CLT is that working memory
capacity is increased by using two different sensory channels as compared
with only one. However, from an evolutionary perspective, this enhanced
learning of a biologically secondary skill may be more appropriately
attributed to the assistance of biologically primary skills. That is, the use of
this kind of dual-mode instructional approach is beneficial because humans
have evolved to listen to a description of an object while looking at it, not to
read a description of it (a biologically secondary skill itself) while looking at
it (Paas & Sweller, 2012).
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
THE EVOLUTIONARY PRECURSORS OF TEACHING
Some exciting theoretical developments have emerged over the past several
years regarding the evolutionary history of pedagogy itself. For example,
Csibra and Gergely (2009, 2011) have hypothesized that a type of human
communication they call natural pedagogy arose during hominin evolution
to facilitate the transmission of generic technological knowledge and skills
between individuals. This adaptation is proposed to have evolved to enable
“fast and efficient social learning of cognitively opaque cultural knowledge
that would be hard to acquire relying on purely observational learning mechanisms alone” (2009, p. 148). Furthermore, according to Tehrani and Riede
(2008), a review of the archaeological record suggests that pedagogy has been
vital for accurately transmitting skills across generations. In contrast, after
reviewing the ethnographic record of traditional societies, Lancy (2010) concluded, “Teaching has been largely superfluous in the process of cultural
transmission throughout human history” (p. 97). Although Sterelny (2012)
agrees that the role of teaching was frequently quite limited in traditional
societies, he also points out that “adults can and do structure and engineer
the learning environment, even without explicit teaching” (p. 36).
A recent review of these and other perspectives on the evolution and
ontogeny of teaching has led some researchers to conclude that teaching is
both species typical—universal across cultures—and species unique, that
is, not evident in nonhuman species (Strauss & Ziv, 2012). Of course, these
conclusions depend in part on how one defines teaching. For example, a
definition based on cognitive components stipulates that teaching is an
intentional activity for increasing the understanding of another who is
judged (via a so-called theory of mind) to either lack knowledge or possess
a false belief (Ziv & Frye, 2004). Certainly, adopting such a definition would
rule out nonhuman animals as being capable of teaching. Nonetheless,
the point here is that an evolutionary perspective can inform the study
of proximate or immediate factors that influence the development and
acquisition of teaching skills, and thus may yield unique insights into how
humans have evolved to transmit (teach), as well as learn, novel culturally
important information.
KEY ISSUES
Children’s natural interest in novelty and their motivation to learn their
culture may get them started in school but is not likely to maintain long-term
academic learning. One possibility may be to capitalize on the fuzzy boundary between primary and secondary domains during the early years of
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
7
schooling and children’s motivation to learn culturally important knowledge and to use these to build academic self-efficacy and other beliefs that
will help to maintain effort in school learning in later years.
There may be an excess reliance on “internal” motivation for academic
learning, at the expense of focusing on the utility of the learning. If we
assume that children are inherently motivated to learn in academic domains
and learn as effortlessly as they learn in folk domains, then we risk undervaluing the importance of focus and effort for secondary learning. Without
an explicit assumption that learning will require effort, we put children at
risk for making attributions (e.g., they do not have the ability to learn the
material) that may undermine their engagement with school when academic
material becomes difficult.
CONCLUSION
An evolutionary approach to children’s academic learning and motivation
in school can explain why learning to read is more difficult than learning a
native language, among many other primary–secondary contrasts (Geary,
2007), and why many children are more motivated to socialize with their
friends than to learn algebra. This perspective has profound implications
for how to design instruction to address these differences and to better
understand and address the motivational and attributional (e.g., that
learning requires effort) factors that will influence long-term engagement in
academic learning.
REFERENCES
Atran, S. (1998). Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals
and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 547–609.
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2009). Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13,
148–153.
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2011). Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 1149–1157.
Darwin, C. (1859). The origin of species by means of natural selection (6th ed.). London,
England: John Murray.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The organization of learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/
Bradford Books.
Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children’s cognition:
Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psychologist, 50, 24–37.
Geary, D. C. (2005). The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Geary, D. C. (2007). Educating the evolved mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating
the evolved mind (Vol. 2, Psychological perspectives on contemporary educational
issues, pp. 1–99). Greenwich, CT: Information Age.
Geary, D. C. (2008). An evolutionarily informed education science. Educational Psychologist, 43, 279–295.
Gelman, R. (1990). First principles organize attention to and learning about relevant
data: Number and animate-inanimate distinction as examples. Cognitive Science,
14, 79–106.
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lancy, D. F. (2010). Learning “from nobody”: The limited role of teaching in folk
models of children’s development. Childhood in the Past, 3, 79–106.
Paas, F., & Sweller, J. (2012). An evolutionary upgrade of cognitive load theory: Using
the human motor system and collaboration to support the learning of complex
cognitive tasks. Educational Psychology Review, 24, 27–45.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York, NY: William Morrow.
Scarr, S. (1992). Developmental theories of the 1990s: Developmental and individual
differences. Child Development, 63, 1–19.
Sterelny, K. (2012). The evolved apprentice: How evolution made humans unique. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Strauss, S., & Ziv, M. (2012). Teaching is a natural cognitive ability for humans. Mind,
Brain, and Education, 6, 186–196.
Sweller, J. (2004). Instructional design consequences of an analogy between evolution
by natural selection and human cognitive architecture. Instructional Science, 32,
9–31.
Tehrani, J. J., & Riede, F. (2008). Towards an archaeology of pedagogy: Learning,
teaching and the generation of material culture traditions. World Archaeology, 40,
316–331.
Ziv, M., & Frye, D. (2004). Children’s understanding of teaching: The role of knowledge and belief. Cognitive Development, 19, 457–477.
DAVID C. GEARY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. David C. Geary received a BS in psychology from Santa Clara University,
an MS in child clinical/school psychology from California State University,
and an MA and PhD in developmental psychology from the University of
California, Riverside. Upon completion of his PhD in 1986, he held faculty
positions at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Missouri, first at the Science and Technology campus and then in Columbia. Dr.
Geary served as chair of his department from 2002 to 2005 and as the University of Missouri’s Middlebush Professor of Psychological Sciences from 2000
to 2003. He is currently a Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Fellow.
He has published nearly 250 articles, commentaries, and chapters across a
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
9
wide range of topics, including three sole-authored books; Children’s mathematical development, Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences (now
in second edition, 2010), and The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition,
and general intelligence as well as one co-authored book, Sex differences: Summarizing more than a century of scientific research. He served as a member of
the President’s National (US) Mathematics Advisory Panel and Chaired the
Learning Processes subcommittee, is a recipient of a MERIT award from the
National Institutes of Health, and was appointed by President G. W. Bush
to the National Board of Directors for the Institute for Education Sciences.
He currently directs NIH- and NSF-funded studies on young children’s and
adolescents’ mathematical cognition and learning, as well as various projects
in evolutionary psychology.
Web page: http://web.missouri.edu/∼gearyd/
DANIEL B. BERCH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Daniel B. Berch is Professor of Educational Psychology and Applied
Developmental Science at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of
Education. Before this position, he was Associate Dean for Research and
Faculty Development at the Curry School. Before coming to the University
of Virginia, Dr. Berch served as Associate Chief of the Child Development
and Behavior Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, NIH. His previous federal service included a year spent as
a Senior Research Associate at the US Department of Education, advising
the Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement. Dr.
Berch has published articles on children’s numerical cognition and mathematical learning disabilities, and is senior editor of the book, Why is Math
So Hard For Some Children? The Nature and Origins of Mathematical Learning
Difficulties and Disabilities. Among other honors, he received the NIH Award
of Merit, was elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association’s
Division of Experimental Psychology, served as an ex officio member of
the US Department of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel
commissioned by President George W. Bush, and currently serves as a
member of the Evolution Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board. For the
past several years, Dr. Berch has been working on the implications of
evolutionary theory for educational research and practice, publishing a book
chapter on instructing evolved minds and serving as one of the Evolution
Institute’s primary organizers of a 2013 conference on evolutionary perspectives in education research funded by the American Educational Research
Association.
Web page: http://curry.virginia.edu/academics/directory/daniel-b.-berch
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
RELATED ESSAYS
Economics of Early Education (Economics), W. Steven Barnett
Kin-Directed Behavior in Primates (Anthropology), Carol M. Berman
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development (Psychology), Jondou Chen and
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Genetics and the Life Course (Sociology), Evan Charney
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
Social Class and Parental Investment in Children (Sociology), Anne H.
Gauthier
Changing Family Patterns (Sociology), Kathleen Gerson and Stacy Torres
Language and Thought (Psychology), Susan Goldin-Meadow
Family Relationships and Development (Psychology), Joan E. Grusec
Genetics and Social Behavior (Anthropology), Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran
An Evolutionary Perspective on Developmental Plasticity (Psychology),
Sarah Hartman and Jay Belsky
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Childhood (Anthropology), Karen L. Kramer
Two-Systems View of Children’s Theory-of-Mind Understanding (Psychology), Jason Low
Evolutionary Perspectives on Animal and Human Personality (Anthropology), Joseph H. Manson and Lynn A. Fairbanks
Neural and Cognitive Plasticity (Psychology), Eduardo Mercado III
A Bio-Social-Cultural Approach to Early Cognitive Development: Entering
the Community of Minds (Psychology), Katherine Nelson
How Form Constrains Function in the Human Brain (Psychology), Timothy
D. Verstynen
Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman
Behavioral Heterochrony (Anthropology), Victoria Wobber and Brian Hare
Evolutionary Approaches to
Understanding Children’s
Academic Achievement
DAVID C. GEARY and DANIEL B. BERCH
Abstract
There are evolved cognitive biases that influence what people pay attention to (e.g.,
faces, not rocks) and how they interpret this information (e.g., underlying intentions). These cognitive biases are organized to help us understand ourselves and
other people (folk psychology), other species (folk biology), and the physical world
(folk physics). Human cultural advances have resulted in the development of evolutionarily novel concepts (e.g., natural selection) and skills (e.g., reading) that are built
from this evolved core. The basic architecture of folk cognitive biases is universal and
adapted to nuances in local conditions as children play, interact with other people,
and explore the environment. The learning of evolutionarily novel competencies is
necessary for success in today’s economy but children do not learn these as easily
as they adapt folk knowledge nor are they as motivated to engage in the associated
activities. This is because learning academic competencies requires adapting folk systems for tasks for which they did not evolve. The associated activities (e.g., direct
instruction) are very different from the activities (e.g., play) that foster the adaptation
of folk abilities to local conditions. Schooling thus involves the society-wide organization of children’s activities so they learn competencies that would not otherwise
emerge. This perspective allows us to better understand the importance of working
memory, a motivational focus on effort, and the need for explicit, organized instruction for children’s learning in school.
INTRODUCTION
Darwin’s (1859) natural selection is the organizing framework for all of the
biological sciences, and yet many social and educational scientists continue to
ignore or actively resist the insights that can be achieved by viewing human
behavior and cognition from an evolutionary lens. Focusing the evolutionary
lens on children’s learning and motivation in school has great potential to
expand our understanding of these processes and to develop better ways to
ensure that children are well prepared for the demands of living in today’s
modern world. We provide a brief introduction to evolutionary educational
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
psychology, and then highlight current research efforts in the field and issues
that remain to be addressed.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The foundational insight is that there are critical differences between what
children have evolved to easily learn in natural environments and what they
are expected to learn in school (Geary, 1995). The distinction is important
because nearly all of school-taught academic material is evolutionarily novel
in that these were developed only recently; in fact formal schooling is an
evolutionary novel cultural innovation (Geary, 2007). Universal schooling
is necessary because navigating life in the modern world requires learning
the novel skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, to name only the basics.
If children learned these skills as easily as they learn language or how to
interpret the facial expressions of other people, for instance, formal schooling
would not be necessary.
To understand evolutionarily novel or biologically secondary competencies, it is first necessary to understand the evolved or biologically primary
foundation upon which these are built. This foundation of core domains coalesces around folk psychology, folk biology, and folk physics (Atran, 1998;
Gallistel, 1990; R. Gelman, 1990; S. Gelman, 2003; Pinker, 1994), as shown in
Figure 1. These are universal in that humans have an inherent bias to process
and organize information in these domains, although the extent to which
they are elaborated and aspects of the surface features (e.g., language) of the
domain can vary across cultures.
Folk psychology is organized around the self, other individuals, and group
dynamics. The first includes awareness of the self as a social being and of
one’s relationships with other people. The individual-level system processes
information that guides one-on-one social dynamics and supports dyadic
relationships. The group-level systems enable individuals to break their
social world into categories of people. Folk biology supports the ability to
develop taxonomies of other species and acquire knowledge about these
species that is critical to the survival of people in traditional societies. Folk
physics enables navigation, generation of mental representations of physical
space, the construction of tools, and an implicit understanding of magnitude
and time.
EVOLUTION AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Children are biologically prepared to learn in folk domains and are inherently
motivated—for example, the “fun” associated with peer play is an evolved
reward that ensures engagement in these activities—to seek out experiences
3
Self
schema
Noverbal
behavior
Facial
expression
Language
Individual
Theory
of
mind
Person
schema
Kin
In-group
Out-group
Group
Group
schema:
ideology
Essence
Flora
Folk biology
Fauna
Movement
Represent
Folk physics
Ecological information
Tool
use
Figure 1 Biologically primary folk domains. Source: Adapted from “The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general
intelligence,” by D. G. Geary, 2005, p. 129. Copyright 2005 by American Psychological Association.
Self
awareness
Self
Folk psychology
Social information
Information-processing
domains
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
that will facilitate the fleshing out and adapting of folk knowledge to local
conditions (R. Gelman, 1990; Scarr, 1992). Play, social interactions, and exploration of the environment and objects appear to be the ways in which children
generate the experiences that result in this adaption. Children are neither
explicitly aware they are learning about the social, biological, and physical
world as they play nor do they need to engage in effortful processing for this
learning to occur.
COGNITIVE AND ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT
Humans clearly have the ability to create and learn evolutionarily novel
concepts and skills, but this does not come as easily as fleshing out folk
competencies (Geary, 2005). One reason is that the skeletal structure of
folk systems is essentially implicit knowledge about core aspects of these
domains. Infants orient and react to other humans, not because they are
explicitly aware that they are members of the same species but because
folk systems include features that are sensitive to human biological motion,
human facial features, and so on. There is no corresponding knowledge
for understanding the base-10 Arabic number system. Another reason is
that folk domains will allocate attention to key features of the context, as
in making eye contact during a conversation. When first exposed to books,
toddlers sitting in their parents’ lap do not automatically attend to the words
their parents are reading to them. Finally, almost all children are motivated
to engage in activities that will flesh out folk competencies. A universal
motivation to engage in the activities that will result in mastery of academic
domains is not likely. Many children will attempt to emulate adults’ and
older children’s reading, but this will not result in the basic word decoding
skills needed to actually read. Many people will read for its own sake,
but this is driven by interest in the content of what is being read—often
evolutionarily salient social themes—and not the act of reading itself.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Recent research and theoretical advances concerning both the implications
of an evolutionary perspective for instructional science and the evolutionary origins of pedagogy are likely to shape future approaches to improving
children’s academic achievement.
COGNITIVE LOAD THEORY OF INSTRUCTION
Although the evolutionary perspective is not ready for direct translation
into school curricula, it can be used to generate testable hypotheses about
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
5
the potential effectiveness of alternative instructional methods (Geary, 2008).
That said, it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of empirical studies in instructional science have not been informed by evolutionary premises
or principles. A notable exception has been the work of John Sweller and
colleagues, whose studies of effective instructional strategies are founded on
cognitive load theory (CLT), which espouses an evolutionary perspective.
A predominant approach to the design of instructional techniques, CLT
claims that human cognitive architecture and the manner by which both
its structures and functions have evolved are analogous to the evolution of
biological structures and functions (Sweller, 2004). A central tenet is that
the limited capacity and duration of working memory constrains learners’
acquisition of novel information. Consequently, a fundamental instructional
objective of CLT is to develop techniques for reducing working memory
load during learning.
Until recently, it has been assumed that the capacity limitations of working
memory apply to the acquisition of all information (Paas & Sweller, 2012).
However, building upon the important distinction between biologically primary and biologically secondary knowledge, Paas and Sweller (2012) have
recently amended this perspective. They point out that because humans have
evolved to process biologically primary information, the demands made on
working memory during this processing are minimized. This is not the case
with the learning of biologically secondary information, which is normally
difficult to acquire owing to the sizeable working memory load imposed by
this kind of information, especially during initial learning.
The authors provide several examples of how biologically primary
information can be of assistance when a learner is acquiring biologically
secondary skills, accounting for a number of demonstrated instructional
effects. One interesting example is the “modality effect.” Numerous studies
have shown that instructional formats using two sensory modalities yield
learning superior to equivalent formats that use only a single modality. For
example, studying a pictured (visually presented) object accompanied by a
spoken (auditorily presented) description yields better learning than when
the pictured object is described by written (visually presented) text. The
classic explanation for this outcome based on CLT is that working memory
capacity is increased by using two different sensory channels as compared
with only one. However, from an evolutionary perspective, this enhanced
learning of a biologically secondary skill may be more appropriately
attributed to the assistance of biologically primary skills. That is, the use of
this kind of dual-mode instructional approach is beneficial because humans
have evolved to listen to a description of an object while looking at it, not to
read a description of it (a biologically secondary skill itself) while looking at
it (Paas & Sweller, 2012).
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
THE EVOLUTIONARY PRECURSORS OF TEACHING
Some exciting theoretical developments have emerged over the past several
years regarding the evolutionary history of pedagogy itself. For example,
Csibra and Gergely (2009, 2011) have hypothesized that a type of human
communication they call natural pedagogy arose during hominin evolution
to facilitate the transmission of generic technological knowledge and skills
between individuals. This adaptation is proposed to have evolved to enable
“fast and efficient social learning of cognitively opaque cultural knowledge
that would be hard to acquire relying on purely observational learning mechanisms alone” (2009, p. 148). Furthermore, according to Tehrani and Riede
(2008), a review of the archaeological record suggests that pedagogy has been
vital for accurately transmitting skills across generations. In contrast, after
reviewing the ethnographic record of traditional societies, Lancy (2010) concluded, “Teaching has been largely superfluous in the process of cultural
transmission throughout human history” (p. 97). Although Sterelny (2012)
agrees that the role of teaching was frequently quite limited in traditional
societies, he also points out that “adults can and do structure and engineer
the learning environment, even without explicit teaching” (p. 36).
A recent review of these and other perspectives on the evolution and
ontogeny of teaching has led some researchers to conclude that teaching is
both species typical—universal across cultures—and species unique, that
is, not evident in nonhuman species (Strauss & Ziv, 2012). Of course, these
conclusions depend in part on how one defines teaching. For example, a
definition based on cognitive components stipulates that teaching is an
intentional activity for increasing the understanding of another who is
judged (via a so-called theory of mind) to either lack knowledge or possess
a false belief (Ziv & Frye, 2004). Certainly, adopting such a definition would
rule out nonhuman animals as being capable of teaching. Nonetheless,
the point here is that an evolutionary perspective can inform the study
of proximate or immediate factors that influence the development and
acquisition of teaching skills, and thus may yield unique insights into how
humans have evolved to transmit (teach), as well as learn, novel culturally
important information.
KEY ISSUES
Children’s natural interest in novelty and their motivation to learn their
culture may get them started in school but is not likely to maintain long-term
academic learning. One possibility may be to capitalize on the fuzzy boundary between primary and secondary domains during the early years of
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
7
schooling and children’s motivation to learn culturally important knowledge and to use these to build academic self-efficacy and other beliefs that
will help to maintain effort in school learning in later years.
There may be an excess reliance on “internal” motivation for academic
learning, at the expense of focusing on the utility of the learning. If we
assume that children are inherently motivated to learn in academic domains
and learn as effortlessly as they learn in folk domains, then we risk undervaluing the importance of focus and effort for secondary learning. Without
an explicit assumption that learning will require effort, we put children at
risk for making attributions (e.g., they do not have the ability to learn the
material) that may undermine their engagement with school when academic
material becomes difficult.
CONCLUSION
An evolutionary approach to children’s academic learning and motivation
in school can explain why learning to read is more difficult than learning a
native language, among many other primary–secondary contrasts (Geary,
2007), and why many children are more motivated to socialize with their
friends than to learn algebra. This perspective has profound implications
for how to design instruction to address these differences and to better
understand and address the motivational and attributional (e.g., that
learning requires effort) factors that will influence long-term engagement in
academic learning.
REFERENCES
Atran, S. (1998). Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals
and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 547–609.
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2009). Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13,
148–153.
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2011). Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 1149–1157.
Darwin, C. (1859). The origin of species by means of natural selection (6th ed.). London,
England: John Murray.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The organization of learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/
Bradford Books.
Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children’s cognition:
Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psychologist, 50, 24–37.
Geary, D. C. (2005). The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Geary, D. C. (2007). Educating the evolved mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating
the evolved mind (Vol. 2, Psychological perspectives on contemporary educational
issues, pp. 1–99). Greenwich, CT: Information Age.
Geary, D. C. (2008). An evolutionarily informed education science. Educational Psychologist, 43, 279–295.
Gelman, R. (1990). First principles organize attention to and learning about relevant
data: Number and animate-inanimate distinction as examples. Cognitive Science,
14, 79–106.
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lancy, D. F. (2010). Learning “from nobody”: The limited role of teaching in folk
models of children’s development. Childhood in the Past, 3, 79–106.
Paas, F., & Sweller, J. (2012). An evolutionary upgrade of cognitive load theory: Using
the human motor system and collaboration to support the learning of complex
cognitive tasks. Educational Psychology Review, 24, 27–45.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York, NY: William Morrow.
Scarr, S. (1992). Developmental theories of the 1990s: Developmental and individual
differences. Child Development, 63, 1–19.
Sterelny, K. (2012). The evolved apprentice: How evolution made humans unique. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Strauss, S., & Ziv, M. (2012). Teaching is a natural cognitive ability for humans. Mind,
Brain, and Education, 6, 186–196.
Sweller, J. (2004). Instructional design consequences of an analogy between evolution
by natural selection and human cognitive architecture. Instructional Science, 32,
9–31.
Tehrani, J. J., & Riede, F. (2008). Towards an archaeology of pedagogy: Learning,
teaching and the generation of material culture traditions. World Archaeology, 40,
316–331.
Ziv, M., & Frye, D. (2004). Children’s understanding of teaching: The role of knowledge and belief. Cognitive Development, 19, 457–477.
DAVID C. GEARY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. David C. Geary received a BS in psychology from Santa Clara University,
an MS in child clinical/school psychology from California State University,
and an MA and PhD in developmental psychology from the University of
California, Riverside. Upon completion of his PhD in 1986, he held faculty
positions at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Missouri, first at the Science and Technology campus and then in Columbia. Dr.
Geary served as chair of his department from 2002 to 2005 and as the University of Missouri’s Middlebush Professor of Psychological Sciences from 2000
to 2003. He is currently a Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Fellow.
He has published nearly 250 articles, commentaries, and chapters across a
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement
9
wide range of topics, including three sole-authored books; Children’s mathematical development, Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences (now
in second edition, 2010), and The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition,
and general intelligence as well as one co-authored book, Sex differences: Summarizing more than a century of scientific research. He served as a member of
the President’s National (US) Mathematics Advisory Panel and Chaired the
Learning Processes subcommittee, is a recipient of a MERIT award from the
National Institutes of Health, and was appointed by President G. W. Bush
to the National Board of Directors for the Institute for Education Sciences.
He currently directs NIH- and NSF-funded studies on young children’s and
adolescents’ mathematical cognition and learning, as well as various projects
in evolutionary psychology.
Web page: http://web.missouri.edu/∼gearyd/
DANIEL B. BERCH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Daniel B. Berch is Professor of Educational Psychology and Applied
Developmental Science at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of
Education. Before this position, he was Associate Dean for Research and
Faculty Development at the Curry School. Before coming to the University
of Virginia, Dr. Berch served as Associate Chief of the Child Development
and Behavior Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, NIH. His previous federal service included a year spent as
a Senior Research Associate at the US Department of Education, advising
the Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement. Dr.
Berch has published articles on children’s numerical cognition and mathematical learning disabilities, and is senior editor of the book, Why is Math
So Hard For Some Children? The Nature and Origins of Mathematical Learning
Difficulties and Disabilities. Among other honors, he received the NIH Award
of Merit, was elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association’s
Division of Experimental Psychology, served as an ex officio member of
the US Department of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel
commissioned by President George W. Bush, and currently serves as a
member of the Evolution Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board. For the
past several years, Dr. Berch has been working on the implications of
evolutionary theory for educational research and practice, publishing a book
chapter on instructing evolved minds and serving as one of the Evolution
Institute’s primary organizers of a 2013 conference on evolutionary perspectives in education research funded by the American Educational Research
Association.
Web page: http://curry.virginia.edu/academics/directory/daniel-b.-berch
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