Abstract

Recent findings have shown that children’s teaching is guided by their evaluation of what a pupil does versus does not know. While children certainly teach to remedy a knowledge gap between themselves and a learner, we argue that children’s appraisal of the nature of the knowledge that they are seeking to convey and not just whether a knowledge gap exists plays an important role in children’s decision to transmit information. Specifically, we argue that children are more likely to transmit information a pupil does not know in at least three cases: if that information is difficult for the learner to acquire on her own, generic rather than specific, and normative rather than descriptive.