Researcher hopes to protect kids from deceptive advertising

Dr Candice Mills: “Given the difficulty that children and adults often have in problem solving, it is important to better understand the rudimentary development of problem-solving skills.”

A University of Texas at Dallas researcher is examining how children evaluate information to solve problems and learn how to think critically, with the aim of combating misleading advertising aimed at young people.

Children's lack of cynicism is refreshing to adults, but to navigate through life successfully, individuals must know how to differentiate between reliable and doubtful sources of information.

Dr. Candice Mills hopes her research helps arm children against deceptive advertising.

Dr. Mills, assistant professor in the School of Behavioural and Brain Sciences and a researcher in the Centre for Children and Families, is seeking preschool and elementary-age children to participate in two separate studies.

The first study, sponsored by a US$153 000 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, is studying ways to help preschool-age children determine what sources are most helpful in answering their questions. Mills and her team also are looking at other aspects of problem solving, such as the ability to ask good questions and use new information.

A group of 4 and 5-year-olds will be asked to solve simple problems with the help of outside sources with different levels of reliability: a knowledgeable source, an "ignorant" source (who admits to not knowing the answers) and an "inaccurate" source (who provides wrong answers). The experiment will observe how children learn about the knowledge status of each source: through experience, explicit labelling, observation or the combination of explicit labelling and observation.

'It is important to understand the rudimentary development of problem-solving skills better'

"Given the difficulty that children and adults often have in problem solving, it is important to better understand the rudimentary development of problem-solving skills," Mills said. "The results from this research will inform scientists and practitioners in education and child development regarding early developments in children's problem-solving abilities. Determining some of the factors that may help children recognise that a source should be discounted should be useful in developing programs to combat misleading ads."

Another study will look at 7 to 9-year-old children and how they develop the ability to critically evaluate the information they encounter. Children will participate in several short tasks designed to measure how they consider information.

The study also will observe how parents and children interact when discussing questionable sources because parent-child interaction is considered vital to learning. Parent-child conversations will be monitored to see how they discuss different kinds of misinformation presented in storybooks.

Most young children can recognise some sources are untrustworthy because of inaccuracy or deception, but they may have a hard time spotting biased information or exaggerated claims. Developing this ability to discern will arm young people against misleading information and could help them develop into better decision-makers as adults, Mills said.

This project is supported by a US$22 000 grant from the Timberlawn Psychiatric Research Foundation.

"By examining these issues, we can gain important insight into how to nurture the development of critical-thinking skills as children grow into adults," Mills said.

Source: University of Texas at Dallas