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May Tran - Weeks 4-5




My mentor's other research assistant, Isabel, and I have begun consistently testing at the Bing nursery school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. By now, we've already had the script memorized and have many times had to improvise when the child doesn't follow our script. An example was one incident when Isabel, following our usual protocol, presented the child with a picture of me and asked him if I could come in to watch him play with the toys. The child casually responded, 'No,' and I could see Isabel starting to panic a little since the whole point of our experiment was to have a stranger observe the child play. Isabel questioned the child as to why he did not want me to be inside of the game room, and it turns out the child doesn't want to share his toys with me. As a result, we had to compromise with me observing him from the doorway instead of sitting right next to him.

Other than that, testing has been hard because none of the children wants to go to the game room anymore. Our first few days of testing were more successful since the children who do want to go to the game room would more confidently approach Isabel, but the children who are left are shyer and therefore are less interested to leave the classroom with her. I want to help Isabel, but because I'm a high school student, I cannot directly rapport with the children. I am also playing 'the stranger' so I cannot meet with them before conducting the experiment.

I'm not very good at drawing.
Along with the Persistence Task I've been working on, my mentor has assigned me to another research assistant, Habin, to work on another experiment. This experiment is called the SAT, but I have yet to read any papers about it and so it is still quite new to me. I was given another script where I will also play the confederate that will be observing the children. We haven't started testing with children on this new experiment, but I've helped Habin finished making the toys. I even got to design my own toy! My mentor wanted a replication of the balancing toy Isabel and I have been closely working with, but wanted a different shape for the balancing block. After a lot of thinking, I sketched out a template of the new toy (on the left) and sent it to my mentor. I wrote to her saying that a circular base would make it harder for the children to balance the toy, while we can pile more weight on one of the attached bars to make the toy imbalance. My mentor loves the idea and I got to work on it with Habin.

The finished toy is okay-looking, but I don't think the children will be able to balance it the way some of them successfully balanced the previous block.
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