Goal-directed learning: Its value for adolescents

Goal-directed learning is when we experience something that motivates us to try it again. Perhaps the experience is a bad one, in which case, we might avoid a repetition. So goal-directed learning guides us to whether we want to repeat an experience.

This form of learning is particularly relevant for adolescents. Juliet Davidow, assistant professor of psychology at Northeastern University offers these insights.

The teen years is an incredible time for growth, for self-discovery and developing a sense of who one wants to be in adult life. According to an article published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, goal-directed learning is one of the central processes happening during this period. It states that adolescents learn to perform actions that enable them to obtain desired outcomes; it is gradual experiential, trial-and-error learning.

In the past, goal-directed learning would have included such skills as hunting, foraging and child-care, but today the brain has to face the modern world and our current socio-cultural climate. It involves more abstract behaviour, such as the clicking and swiping actions needed to operate Spotify to play music than produces a desired emotion.

Teenagers learn faster than adults, especially if they are learning something that’s important to them, not something that they are told to learn. In other words, motivation is a big part of goal-directed learning and the goal needs to be something that is desired if it is going to work. A good outcome encourages the adolescent to repeat an activity.

Another important part of the learning process, besides motivation, is surprise. If an adolescent does something and the outcome is surprising, the brain will hold on to that information and do something with it. In order to be surprised, however, the person must first have an expectation, otherwise they can’t be surprised.

When something doesn’t go as expected, the brain is going to try to process why. This creates a goal-directed learning cascade, Davidow says. So, for example, parents or teachers could ask a child what they think will happen before the child tries something.

“If (the result) is surprising, it’ll make that learning stronger,” Davidow says.

Sometimes parents think their teenagers seek out risky experiences that can lead to a bad outcome, she says but that maybe because they’re looking for input. According ot Davidow, “They’re looking for an experience and it just so happens that the experiences they’re finding tend to be these risky, dangerous ones.”

Instead, she says, adults could create situations to allow their teenagers to safely explore outcomes—such as sending them off into nature with supervision.

To start a positive cycle, youngsters have to try out new things. This is the only way they will know whether trying things makes them feel good and motivate them to continue.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.