How Do Young Children Learn to be Consumers? A Script-Processing Approach

The experiments reported in this article examine young children's knowledge-acquisition abilities, relative to older children, with the goal of identifying how young children learn and then using this understanding to design situations in which age differences in learning are eliminated. The results indicate that young children are able to acquire knowledge equivalent to that of older children when the experimental materials and response formats are congruent with their encoding and retrieval abilities. Younger children's learning was enhanced by (1) the repetition of the same event in an audiovisual format, (2) the presentation of somewhat different events in which the goal of the event and the steps involved in enacting the event were made salient, and (3) contextual response formats that enhanced their retrieval skills. I n our society, children become consumers prior to the age of 12, independently spending over $4.2 bil-lion each year for goods and services (McNeal 1986). Given the presence of young children in the market-place, the need to enhance the child's ability to act as an educated consumer has become a topic of concern. If we are to develop programs that systematically teach young children to become informed consumers, a richer understanding of how children learn is essential. This need to explore the young child's knowledge-acquisition skills has spurred a number of consumer-