Which block structure is harder to build?

For 6- to 9-year-old children

Your child will see pictures of people playing with blocks, and they will judge how hard or easy it is to build various block structures!

The ability to reason about the difficulty of a task at hand is crucial to learning. For example, it helps us decide which goals to choose for ourselves and others, how to allocate our time and resources, and how to avoid unecessary failure. But how do we know how hard a given task is when we have not engaged in it before? In this study, we are interested in how children judge how easy (or hard) it is to complete different novel blockbuilding structures. The study will help us understand how children gauge task difficulty.

10 minutes

After you finish the study, we will send you a $5 Amazon.com gift card within two weeks. To be eligible for the gift card, (1) your child must be in the age range for this study, (2) you need to submit a valid consent statement, and (3) we need to see that there is a child with you during the experiment. Each child can only participate in this study once.