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...
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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...
In the past two weeks, I have begun testing on children at the Bing nursery school. The nursery is a part of the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and was a gift from Dr. Peter S. Bing and his mother, Mrs. Anna Bing Arnold. The children enrolled at the nursery are mostly available as research subjects for the Stanford Psychology Department since their parents have given consent to their participation in research. Despite this, the nursery is extremely nice and has all sorts of activities for the children to partake. Within the nursery, there are three main classrooms for the children and experimental rooms for the researchers. These experimental rooms are called 'game rooms' because in order to get a child to participate in their research, an experimenter would have to ask them to come to the game room to play with the experimenter's game. Within these game rooms are cameras, microphones, and a one-way mirror, where the children can be observed from an observat...
Prior to coming to the lab, I was already contacted by my assigned graduate students, whose projects I will be assisting this summer. I was paired with two: Mika and Sophie. They both got in touch with me right away and arranged meetings with me to brief over their projects. With Mika, I will be aiding her further research on children’s representation of the self through social interactions. My project specifically addresses how long a preschooler will persist on a task that they keep failing at given that preschoolers are sensitive to an audience watching them perform the task. As for Sophie, she deliberately withheld specific details about her project to me because I will be coding videos that she recorded during experimental sessions with the children, and therefore it is important that I remain indifferent. On orientation, I met with the 9 other research assistants that volunteered like I did for the summer. We went around introducing ourselves and they all audibly gasped when...