Pecos Experiment

For this assignment, I decided to make a trip to my hometown of Pecos, Texas. Here I visited my sister and her two daughter’s or my two nieces (Jaycie age five and Alena age three). I ask my sister if I could use her girls to help me on a school assignment, reassuring their safety of course, luckily she said yes. After the okay to do the experiment, I grabbed the girls and went to work. The experiment I picked was the conservation concept, where the idea that merely changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily change other key properties. In other words, just because I put the same amount of water in a bigger case, doesn’t change how much water there is. I predict that both the girls would fail at conservation concept, and always
I made sure the girls were not present, so the experiment and my hypothesis was not compromised. I had two small see through glasses both filled half way with water. I even marked half way on both glasses, so there wasn’t any question of if both the glasses had the same amount of water in them. Afterwards I pulled out a long tall glass vase, put it next to the small glasses to compare size. I grabbed one of the glasses of water and poured it into the tall glass vase. Naturally the water in the glass vase was higher, I asked my sister two questions, “Which glass has more water in it or do they both have the same amount?” Of course my twenty five year old sister knew they had the same amount of water in both despite the glass vase looking like it had more. But my experiment isn’t about the adult ability to get the concept of liquid, it is about the ability of young
Each time both the girls would pick the taller glass. There were even sometimes, I would let them pour the water into the taller glass themselves and yet they still picked the taller glass. I ended the experiment because at this point the girls were beginning to fuss at me and each other. I didn’t end it empty handed, this whole experiment helped me have a better understanding for children’s cognitive development.
I conclude that children’s cognitive development was a thing that takes place over time, it might seem limited now, but with some work and time the development will grow and become better. Just because the child doesn’t understand something now, doesn’t mean there is something wrong with them. At one point we were all like that, at one point we all picked would have picked the taller