Actually my college psychology class and I had to do this experiment on the elementary school kids and most of all the kids picked the taller beaker, not because they were stupid they just didn't understand that taller doesn't always mean more! :)
I learned about that yesterday in my psychology class. Up until a certain age, children don't understand things like this. It's the same if you take 10 pennies and put them into two rows of five. They will say the rows have the same number if they are the same length. If you spread one row apart so it's a little longer than the other, even though the child counted them before, said they had the same amount, and saw you spread one row apart, they will still think the row that looks longer has more. It can be frustrating when teaching a child things, but people should understand what the guest said in the last sentence of their comment. Sorry for the long comment by the way. :)
When I was 6 or 7, my teacher did an experiment like this with the whole class, I'm not sure about anyone else but the thing I found most confusing about the experiment was that it seemed like a trick question, it was obvious that they contained the same amount because the teacher told me so.
Psychology - this is suppose to illustrate the development of children's reasoning. This stage is the pre-operational stage in which children lack conservation skills. Nevertheless, I still laughed at this
Comments