What is Information Processing theory?
Until about 50 years ago, psychologists were wary of trying to explain the 'internal workings' of human beings. They saw the mind as an enigma and so they focused on observable behaviours as their best evidence. They either set up laboratory experiments or systematically watched human behaviours in natural settings, including those of children, in order to attempt to explain the how and what of learning.
When working on a large research project in the early 1970s, I was instructed that I must not ask the children questions about what I had observed. The methods were similar to those used by colleagues who were observing apes and we were supposed to keep the data 'clean' and scientific. It was only over the next 30 years that approaches to research widened, to try to understand how the shared meanings and cultures in a community influenced children's development.
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