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  3. Child developmental psychologist Jean Piaget convinced us that young, undeveloped minds couldn’t handle complex concepts because

Child developmental psychologist Jean Piaget convinced us that young, undeveloped minds couldn’t handle complex concepts because

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问题     Child developmental psychologist Jean Piaget convinced us that young, undeveloped minds couldn’t handle complex concepts because they simply weren’t experienced or mature enough yet. Piaget, in fact, believed that young kids could not understand cause and effect, that they couldn’t think logically, and that they also couldn’t handle abstract ideas.
    But child development specialists are finding out that preschoolers without any formal education may have the capacity to understand more complex concepts than we give them credit for.
    Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at University of California Berkeley and her team devised a way to test how well young kids understand the abstract concept of multiple cause and effect—the idea that there may be more than one cause for a single effect. They pitted preschoolers around 4 years old against undergraduates. The study centered around a toy that could be turned on by placing a single blue-colored block on the toy’s tray, but could also be activated if two blocks—orange and purple—were placed on the tray.
    The preschoolers were adept at figuring out that the blue blocks turned on the toy, as did the purple and orange ones, but that the purple and orange ones needed to be paired together. The undergraduates, however, had a harder time accepting the latter solution. Their previous experience in the world hampered their ability to accept the unusual rules that activated the toy.
    Researchers from Johns Hopkins University found a similar effect among preschoolers when it came to math. Previous studies showed that if you present infants with eight objects over and over until they got bored, and then showed them 16, they suddenly regained interest and sensed that things changed. Even before they are taught about numbers or amounts, then, infants seem to have a grasp on quantity. "All the evidence so far leads us to believe that this is something that babies come into the world with," says Melissa Kibbe, co-author of that study. According to her research, the preschoolers had some concept of quantity, and the appropriate amount that they needed to get from a small quantity to a larger one. And there doesn’t seem to be any gender differences in this inborn ability, at least not among the girls and boys Kibbe studied.
    Kibbe’s and Gopnik’s recent work may have broader implications for education, since current math curricula in schools may not be ideal for nurturing the number sense that kids are born with. "There’s an exciting movement in psychology over the past decade, as we learn that students bring certain capabilities, or inborn knowledge that we hadn’t thought they had before," says Jon Star, at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
    Though it may be too early to translate such findings to the classroom, the results lay the groundwork for studying similar inborn skills and how they might be better understood. "The hard part is, educationally, how do you build up and upon this intuitive knowledge in a way that allows a child to capture the complexity but not hold them back. " says Tina Grotzer, associate professor of education at Harvard. Tapping into a child’s still developing sense of numbers and quantities is one thing, but overloading it with too many new constructs about algebra, unknowns, and problem solving may just end up adversely affecting his learning and academic performance. "As soon as concepts get big and complex, there are all sorts of perceptual, attentional, and cognitive costs and challenges involved," she says.

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答案B
解析 Alison G0pnik出现在第三段和第六段。第三段首句指出，艾莉森.戈普尼克及其研究团队设计了一种分辨幼童到底能多好地理解复杂因果关系的抽象概念的方法。B项“发现一种评估孩子对抽象概念的理解方法”中的abstract concepts是文中的原词复现，finds a method和evaluate young kids’ understanding of分别与原文中的devised a way和test how well young kids understand相对应。故答案选B。
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