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Ar Childrens Thinking

Psychologists Clark Hull and the Kendlers devised experiments to test deductive reasoning in children using a two-stage button pressing machine task. The children could complete the individual stages but not integrate the steps to complete the overall task. However, Michael Cole found that adults in an African culture also struggled with the Kendlers' task. When he used a simpler locked box task with meaningful objects like matchboxes and keys, integration was much easier. Simon Hewson further showed that changing perplexing features of the apparatus, like replacing buttons with drawers, allowed children to successfully integrate the steps. This suggests the original task difficulties were due to the apparatus design rather than an inability to reason deductively.

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Prima Aviandry Syahril
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24 views2 pages

Ar Childrens Thinking

Psychologists Clark Hull and the Kendlers devised experiments to test deductive reasoning in children using a two-stage button pressing machine task. The children could complete the individual stages but not integrate the steps to complete the overall task. However, Michael Cole found that adults in an African culture also struggled with the Kendlers' task. When he used a simpler locked box task with meaningful objects like matchboxes and keys, integration was much easier. Simon Hewson further showed that changing perplexing features of the apparatus, like replacing buttons with drawers, allowed children to successfully integrate the steps. This suggests the original task difficulties were due to the apparatus design rather than an inability to reason deductively.

Uploaded by

Prima Aviandry Syahril
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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One of the most eminent of psychologists, Clark Hull, claimed that the essence of
reasoning lies in the putting together of two 'behaviour segments' in some novel
way, never actually performed before, so as to reach a goal.
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Two followers of Clark Hull, Howard and Tracey Kendler, devised a test for children
that was explicitly based on Clark Hull's principles. The children were given the
task of learning to operate a machine so as to get a toy. In order to succeed they
had to go through a two-stage sequence. The children were trained on each stage
separately. The stages consisted merely of pressing the correct one of two buttons
to get a marble; and of inserting the marble into a small hole to release the toy.
<br/><br/></bitlocked>
<bitlocked>
The Kendlers found that the children could learn the separate bits readily enough.
Given the task of getting a marble by pressing the button they could get the
marble; given the task of getting a toy when a marble was handed to them, they
could use the marble. (All they had to do was put it in a hole.) But they did not
for the most part 'integrate', to use the Kendlers' terminology. They did not press
the button to get the marble and then proceed without further help to use the
marble to get the toy. So the Kendlers concluded that they were incapable of
deductive reasoning.
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The mystery at first appears to deepen when we learn, from another psychologist,
Michael Cole, and his colleagues, that adults in an African culture apparently
cannot do the Kendlers' task either. But it lessens, on the other hand, when we
learn that a task was devised which was strictly analogous to the Kendlers' one but
much easier for the African males to handle.
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Instead of the button-pressing machine, Cole used a locked box and two differently
coloured match-boxes, one of which contained a key that would open the box. Notice
that there are still two behaviour segments — 'open the right match-box to get the
key' and 'use the key to open the box' - so the task seems formally to be the same.
But psychologically it is quite different. Now the subject is dealing not with a
strange machine but with familiar meaningful objects; and it is clear to him what
he is meant to do. It then turns out that the difficulty of 'integration' is
greatly reduced.
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Recent work by Simon Hewson is of great interest here for it shows that, for young
children, too, the difficulty lies not in the inferential processes which the task
demands, but in certain perplexing features of the apparatus and the procedure.
When these are changed in ways which do not at all affect the inferential nature of
the problem, then five-year-old children solve the problem as well as college
students did in the Kendlers' own experiments.
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Hewson made two crucial changes. First, he replaced the button-pressing mechanism
in the side panels by drawers in these panels which the child could open and shut.
This took away the mystery from the first stage of training. Then he helped the
child to understand that there was no 'magic' about the specific marble which,
during the second stage of training, the experimenter handed to him so that he
could pop it in the hole and get the reward.
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A child understands nothing, after all, about how a marble put into a hole can open
a little door. How is he to know that any other marble of similar size will do just
as well? Yet he must assume that if he is to solve the problem. Hewson made the
functional equivalence of different marbles clear by playing a 'swapping game' with
the children. The two modifications together produced a jump in success rates from
30 per cent to 90 per cent for five-year-olds and from 35 per cent to 72.5 per cent
for four-year-olds. For three-year- olds, for reasons that are still in need of
clarification, no improvement—rather a slight drop in performance - resulted from
the change.
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<bitlocked>
We may conclude, then, that children experience very real difficulty when faced
with the Kendler apparatus; but this difficulty cannot be taken as proof that they
are incapable of deductive reasoning.
<br/><br/></bitlocked>
<bitlocked>
<* <iframe src='../quiz/ar_childrens_thinking_quiz.html' height='38px'
width='107px' style='margin:0; overflow=hidden; scrolling:no;
position:relative;'></iframe> *>
<br/><br/></bitlocked>

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