Smart Boy Story...

Most of you guys know that I've been an little out of it for a couple of weeks. Now that I'm feeling "with it" again, I'll tell you about my smart little boy :)

In my Early Childhood class (infant, child and adolescent development) we recently studied some of the leading theories of child development. Piaget was a Swiss child psychologist, biologist, and researcher who has some very famous experiments on childhood cognitive development, specifically, those that demonstrate the structures of thought and reasoning in children and how these skills advance from stage to stage.

Some of his most well-known experiments deal with the conservation of quantity under transformation. The experiment begins by pouring water from a large pitcher into two identical pyrex measuring cups. Say you have 10 ounces of water in each cup. You ask the child to carefully compare and see if both are the same, or if one has more than the other. After the child determines that the amounts are equal, you pour the entire contents of one measuring cup into a tall drinking glass, and then pour all of the other measuring cup into a short, wide glass, as the child watches.

Children who haven't reached the age of say, at least 8 or 9 (and commonly even up to age 11) will nearly always tell you that the tall glass contains more liquid than the short glass, as their reasoning hasn't yet reached the stage where they can apply the logic of 10 oz = 10 oz, no matter what shape or size the container.

I did this experiment with Ethan with glasses of sweet tea (tea gets his attention, water doesn't). When I asked him to tell me who had more, me (short glass) or him (tall glass), he said that I had more. Of course I was really surprised to hear that. I said, "Are you sure?" He nodded his head, and said, "You still have the big pitcher, too!"

I asked my teacher what to infer from this, and when she asked Ethan's age, she couldn't believe it. She's done that experiment with 45 or 50 kids, she said, and none of them has ever said anything like that.