Altering the Questioning Strategies of Preschool Children

DENNEY, NANCY WADSWORTH, and CoNNORS, GERARD J. Altering the Questioning Strategies of Preschool Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1974, 45, 1108-1112. Preschool children who asked no constraint-seeking questions during a pretest with the 20-questions procedure were assigned to 3 conditions: an exemplary-modeling condition, a strategy-modeling condition, and a control condition. In the exemplary-modeling condition, an adult model simply asked constraintseeking questions. In the strategy-modeling condition, an adult model verbalized his strategy for formulating and utilizing constraint-seeking questions in addition to exemplifying such questions. On the first posttest, in which the stimulus array was the same as one used during training, subjects in both modeling conditions asked significantly more constraint-seeking questions and required fewer questions to reach solution than subjects in the control condition. On the second posttest, in which the stimulus array was one that had not been used during training, only subjects in the strategy-modeling condition asked significantly more constraintseeking questions and solved the problem with fewer questions than the control group.