Curse this mess

I have fond memories of spending entire afternoons as a teacher assistant in developmental psychology watching children figuring shit out as my students were administering classical piagetian tasks to them.

Piaget’s research method was to present (supposedly) fun tasks to children to figure out at what age/developmental stage they acquired certain concepts such as conservation of matter, for example. It’s less standardized testing (although the task itself is the same for every child) and more of a conversation with the child to try to figure out their reasoning. (So YES very much talking to them! You ask a lot of questions. A LOT.) The point of Piaget’s developmental psychology theory is that children before a certain age/developmental stage absolutely CANNOT grasp certain concepts because they just haven’t matured enough to do so. Doesn’t matter that it seems perfectly logical to you as an adult, doesn’t matter that you show them that’s not how it works, doesn’t matter that you try to explain it to them. They CAN’T get it.

Of course in that class we’d test children that were right on the cusp of acquiring said concept as to have a variety of responses to the task (it’s not like you turn idk 7 and it suddenly dawns on you, there’s individual differences, hence the variety at the same age/inside the same classroom). Some of these children would be baffled by the questions because the answers seemed so obvious to them there must have been some kinda trick to us asking. Some were equally sure of their answers although the answers were, technically, “wrong” and they would not hesitate to give contradictory justifications to their answers. (Doesn’t actually matter if it’s right or wrong in practice, you’re trying to figure out their developmental stage, it’s not a school exam.) Some of them initially didn’t understand, until they had a “eureka” moment so intense and sudden you could almost see the lighbulb light up above their head as they went “OH WAIT ACTUALLY I KNOW” and it made me beam every single time.

But the most fascinating ones were the ones who understood that their solution wasn’t adequate, but couldn’t figure the “right” solution because they just weren’t quite there yet. I swear some of them must have laid awake at night at the end of the day still trying to understand what the answer was with how hard I saw them thinking during the task. And some of these children, the ones on the cusp of the cusp, would come up with such creative solutions to that cognitive dilemma as well!

My favorite was a kid around 9 years old. The task was the islands task, and here’s how it goes : you present the child with a blue cardboard sheet on which there is brown rectangles and squares. This is the sea, you explain, and these are islands. There’s a wooden block you set on an island that fits it perfectly. This is a house, you say. People are living in it. The problem is, the island it’s built on is sinking! You must build a new house for the residents on this other island. The new house needs to be just as big as the old house, so everyone can live in it like they used to in the old house. You give the child a bunch of small wooden cubes and let them build a new house. Now here’s what you don’t tell the child : the trick is that the first island is 3x3 cubes, and the second island is 3x2 cubes. If you were to build the big block with the little wooden cubes it’d be 3x3x4 cubes. To get the same volume on the new island, the child must thus build a 3x2x6 house with the cubes.

Accordring to Piaget, children between 5 and 7 yo (again: not exact ages) will first refuse to build a higher building than the model even though they should and then will build higher but not know when to stop (some children I’ve seen stacked all the cubes at their disposal, making high, very unstable towers, two to three times the height of the old house, without batting an eye). Between the ages of 7 and 11-12, the child will start to measure the old house with the cubes to try to figure out how much higher the new house must be until they’re able to figure out how big a story is and multiply by the height etc. Children from 12 years old on should have acquired volume conservation and get it right more or less easily.

That child I saw though wasn’t there yet. He was at the point where he wouldn’t build higher than the model. So he built a 3x2x4 house on the new island. But he KNEW that it wasn’t big enough to fit everyone inside! He was positively perplexed by the problem. He could voice the issue, the island was smaller, but didn’t know what to do with that information. He tried building beside the island, so the base of the building would be the same size as the old one. “Oh but look,” my student told him, “you can’t do this because it’s in the water! It will sink!” The boy spent long minutes thinking about it. “We could build it on stilts,” he said. My student was not prepared for this but she did well. “We don’t have stilts, unfortunately, we only have cubes,” she said. He spent more long minutes thinking about it. “But if we sink many many cubes, then we can build on top of them, maybe?” My student looked up at me baffled. “No, unfortunately we can’t do that, the sea is so deep we wouldn’t have enough cubes,” she said. She put her hands on the blue cardboard all around the house he built. “See you can’t build here, nor here, nor here, nor here. Where else could you build?” He thought some more. By then, all my other students had moved on to the next task already. As the teacher told this student they should do the same, he still came up with a last idea : “What about floaters?”

This child thought about stilts, sinking building materials until it filled the sea, and floaters before he thought about building a taller building. If you don’t find that fantastic and fascinating I don’t know what to tell you. Creativity through the roof! I would spend my whole life watching children figuring shit out if I could.

sandwich perfect for bringing

to school tomorrow