The last two weeks wrap up my time testing at the Bing nursery school. The balancing toy had malfunctioned again, which meant that I had to secretly switch blocks underneath the table once again. We were able to view the data for the first time, and strangely there was a correlation in our data! It seemed that the children who were observed failing seemed to persist more in trying to balance the impossible toy than children who were observed both failing and succeeding, in contradiction to Isabel's theory that it depends on how stubborn a child is.
Based on our results, we reject our earlier hypothesis that the children in the Accurate condition would attempt more than the children in the Fail condition on the impossible toy. Initially, we believed that children in the Fail condition would give up on the toy sooner because they may not wish to keep failing in front of someone who has watched them only failed. However, our results lead us to believe that perhaps children in the Fail condition kept trying because they want to 'redeem' their previous failures in front of the confederate. The data for Active Time and Total Time had similar averages across the two conditions and we have yet to figure out why that is.
Since the nursery school has closed for the summer, I will only be returning next week for children who are brought in by their parents specifically for research.


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