Manipulation and learning in children

That children have the tendency to manipulate things has been well-recognized, but manipulation as a motive in their learning has received little attention in the psychological laboratory. Stevenson and McBee(4), studying the learning of object and pattern discrimination by children, using children of four and six-year olds as subjects and stereometric objects, planometric objects and patterns as stimuli, found that children learned to discriminate the stereometric objects more rapidly than the others and that the middle-sized stimulus was most difficult for the younger subjects. Terrell and his co-workers<5,6> made studies on the manipulatory motivation in children and on their discrimination learning. They found that the older children learned more quickly than the younger and that the manipulative group learned the task more quickly than other groups. Manipulation in the form of pushing a button was sufficiently motivating as to make other incentives, such as candy rewards, unnecessary. They made the suggestion that learning can be facilitated by increasing the amount of manipulative activity in the solution of the task.