Early Childhood Observations

Discussion/Analysis/Conclusion: My claim is that a third of children ages 5 to 6 will eat the marshmallow. During my experiment, I discovered that most children will not eat the marshmallow in less than twelve minutes. Only two out of the nineteen children, approximately 11% of everyone tested, ate the marshmallow. The first child to eat the marshmallow was five years old, and succumbed 11 minutes 29 seconds into the experiment. She only had 31 seconds remaining before my scheduled return. The second child to eat the marshmallow was six years old, and did so after 9 Minutes 27 Seconds. Although my hypothesis which stated, “If a child is under the age of seven years old, he or she will eat the marshmallow in less than ten minutes,” was wrong, I was able to see behavioral differences among the ages of the
The younger children (ages 5 to 7) used more physical distractions to endure their wait. Some of their coping strategies involved walking around the room, shifting on the chair, or playing with toys, while the older children (ages 8 to 10) waited by doodling, reading signs around the room, tapping their fingers, or not doing anything at all. Things that went wrong that I didn’t anticipate included the experiment getting interrupted, the distractions presented by some of the materials in the testing environment, outside visual and audible distractions, children telling each other about the experiment, and a camera failure. I experienced several interruptions, one caused by a janitor, another by a teacher, and the last by a parent waiting to pick their child up. These interruptions could have influenced the results of the experiment either positively or negatively. I paused the clock for