How children's understanding of gravity changes as they grow older

What happens if you drop a ball in a falling elevator and why? Your answer will of course depend on the sophistication of your understanding of the laws of physics. Psychologists in France and the Netherlands have used similar questions to test the understanding of 144 children and teenagers aged 5 to 18 years. The results show how children's naive understanding of gravity matures through different stages as a result of their first-hand experience and exposure to formal teaching and cultural explanations.Soren Frappart and her colleagues tested the children's understanding in six contexts using cartoons, pictures and models. The young participants were asked to say what would happen if Billy dropped a stone on earth; in a lift in free fall; in a spaceship orbiting the earth; on the moon; on a planet with no air; and on a planet with air. Specifically, in each case, the children and teens had to indicate whether the stone would go down, float, or go up, and then explain why*.The children's answers fell into three distinguishable levels of understanding, with each tending to be reached at different ages. A significant proportion (23 per cent) of the 5-year-olds said that the stone falls in all six contexts, and their explanations were mostly intuitive (e.g. "a stone can only fall"), or they gave no explanation at all. Presumably their answers were based largely on their first-hand experience that things fall.Starting from age 7 and up to age 15, the children's and teens' answer...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs