Effects of Reinforcing Attention and Response Confirmation on Preschool Children Observational Learning

Abstract

Observational learning was studied in preschool children, comparing their performance under two reinforcement conditions: a) by attending other children' s responses, and b) by confirming other children' s answers. Four third grade preschool children, were trained to discriminate a series of drawings designed as a combination of ideograms of the Japanese Kanji and some international symbols of Agriculture. The subjects were divided in pairs and undergone both conditions in an individual design of pretest-postest in arder to evaluate their discrimination level. During the training, two types of stimuli were introduced: the trained stimulus in a direct form; and the reinforced stimulus by being observed or confirmed by other trained children. A third stimulus was included as a control in pretest and postest. In the results a difference was observed on the levels of discrimination between the phases of pretest and postest: 1) in the stimuli that was trained directly, an increase of 17.5% to 97.5% of correct answers was observed; 2) in the stimuli reinforced by attention, the increase was slightly minor, its level increased from 30% to 62%, while in the stimuli reinforced by confirmation, the increase observed was from 20% to 95 %; 3) on the stimuli used as control, the noted change was only from 10% to 12.5%.,This study replicated the findings obtained previously by Zarate and Le Blanc (1983) and confirmed that although observation facilitates the learning of certain task~, observational learning is better when the response is confirmed because in addition, information on the quality of the response is also provided.