Videotapes of Five- to Eight-Year-Old Children Trying to Solve the Balance

Multiple Choice

Videotapes of five- to eight-year-old children trying to solve the balance beam problem were inspected. When weight and distance were in conflict in the balance beam problem, which of the following was observed?

A) The preoperational children seemed to treat each side of the fulcrum as two separate piles of weights
B) The five-year-olds seemed to encode information both about weight on either side of the fulcrum, and the distance between each pile of weights and the fulcrum
C) The eight-year-olds seemed to treat each side of the fulcrum as two separate piles of weights
D) The younger and older children encoded the balance beam array in the same way