Cause and Effect
Young children frequently display magical thinking, proposing preposterous or clearly unrealistic explanations (often humorous to adults) for why something happens because they have not yet discerned the relationship between cause and effect (Catron & Allen, 2003; Hendrick & Weissman, 2007). Determining why something happens and predicting what might happen when certain conditions are present or constructed represents a complex hierarchy of increasingly analytical concepts.
Logical reasoning develops slowly, gradually replacing magical thinking and animism, children’s tendency to attribute human qualities to inanimate objects or animals (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009). Children’s explanations may be “intuitively reasonable” and therefore hard to change; thus the importance of a constructivist approach that aims to facilitate reconstructing misconceptions through exploring, questioning, predicting, and testing (Landry & Forman, 1999).
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Understanding the relationship between cause and effect is also fundamental to many aspects of behaviorone of the reasons teachers and adults strive to be clear about consequences. Children begin learning about cause and effect intuitively from birth: when I am wet someone changes me, when I am hungry someone feeds me, when I smile, my mommy smiles back, etc. They learn intentionally through informal trial and error during play when they exert force on an object or mix colors of paint, for example.
After repeated trials with identical results, they begin to understand causality and develop confidence in their predictions. Teachers help children learn about cause and effect when they ask questions like “What happened when you put yellow paint on top of the blue paint?” or “What do you think will happen if you put water in the bucket of sand?” or even “What happened the last time you took the baby doll away from Steven?”.
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