ABSTRACT
Anyone who had the good fortune to spend time with Ann was likely regaled by stories of the insights and accomplishments of young children, whether the children with whom she interacted in her research, or the children of friends, colleagues, and students. Over time, the stories increasingly featured precocious Sophie, Ann’s granddaughter. Ann had a tremendous interest in young children as both problem solvers and problem creators. She was also frustrated that schools failed to capitalize on the natural dispositions of young children toward learning:
We appear to grant a great deal more efficiency to the learning of infants than we do to that of older children. This could be because any influences of domain-specific biases to learn are over, by say, five to seven and what one sees in older children is their gradual emergence as increasingly efficient all purpose learning machines, acquiring and using domain-general strategies that will enable them to learn almost anything by brute force. But it could also be the case that because the influence of domain-specific constraints has rarely been investigated in traditional learning experiments, children are granted less ability than they actually possess. (Brown, 1990, p. 108).
