PAC 201 Module 1 Theories and Research in Child Development Example

One Marshmallow or Two? What a Famous Experiment and Its Replications Teach About Theory and Research in Child Development

Student Name

Psychology and Addiction Studies Program, Aspen University

PAC 201: Child Development

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Marshmallow or Two? What a Famous Experiment and Its Replications Teach About Theory and Research in Child Development

At snack time in the four-year-old room at Desert Sprouts Early Learning Center, an invented center in Tucson, the teacher sets a cracker in front of each child and asks them to wait until everyone has one. Mateo eats his immediately. The girl beside him, Ava, folds her hands and watches the teacher. A visitor might conclude that Ava has more self-control and will do better in school. That conclusion would echo one of the most famous studies in child development, and it would also illustrate why child development needs both theory and careful research. This paper uses the marshmallow test and the studies that followed it to explain how researchers theorize and study children's development. Desert Sprouts, Mateo and Ava are fictional, created to illustrate the course; the studies are real.

The Major Theories

Five families of theory do most of the explaining in child development. Piaget pictured the child as a small scientist whose thinking is reorganized at each stage. Vygotsky argued that what a child can do with a helper today, she can do alone tomorrow, and that language is the main tool for that transfer. Learning theorists look at what a child's behavior has earned in the past and what the child has watched others do. Bronfenbrenner asked what surrounds the child, from the snack table to the economy. Biological approaches look at temperament, genes and the growing brain. Each theory directs attention to different causes, and each suggests different research questions. A question about why some children wait for a treat could be framed as a question about cognitive strategies, about learned expectations, about family circumstances or about temperament.

The Original Studies

Mischel et al. (1989) summarized a program of research on delay of gratification in preschool children. In the classic procedure, a child could have one small treat now or, by waiting alone until the adult returned, two treats later. Children differed widely in how long they waited. The researchers found that children's strategies mattered: children who distracted themselves, or who thought about the treats in abstract ways, such as imagining marshmallows as clouds, waited longer than those who focused on how tasty the treats were. Most famously, in follow-up studies, children who had waited longer at age four were described a decade later by their parents as more academically and socially competent, better able to cope with frustration, and they had higher scores on college entrance exams.

The findings fit a cognitive and self-regulation account: some children have, or learn, strategies for controlling impulses, and these strategies serve them well later. The findings became widely known, and the marshmallow test came to be seen as a window into a child's future.

The Replication

Watts et al. (2018) revisited the research using data from a large national study of early child care, which included about nine hundred children from more diverse backgrounds than the original samples. Children who waited longer at age four and a half did show higher achievement at age fifteen, but the association was about half the size reported in the original studies. Once the analysis held constant mothers' education, the home environment and the child's early cognitive skills, roughly two thirds of the association disappeared, and for most outcomes what was left could not be distinguished from chance. Waiting longer seemed to reflect the same family and cognitive advantages that also predicted later achievement, rather than being a strong independent cause of it.

The Experiment

Kidd et al. (2013) tested a different explanation. Before the marshmallow task, children were promised better art supplies. In one condition, the adult returned with the supplies as promised; in the other, the adult returned empty-handed and apologized. Children who had experienced the reliable adult waited, on average, about four times as long as those who had experienced the unreliable one. The authors argued that waiting is partly a rational decision: if a child has learned that adults' promises are kept, waiting makes sense; if promises are often broken, taking the treat now is the sensible choice.

The experiment shows something correlational studies cannot: by changing one thing, the adult's reliability, and holding everything else constant, it shows that experience can cause differences in waiting. It suggests a learning and ecological explanation alongside the self-regulation one.

Comparing the Designs

Lessons for Reading Research

Three lessons follow. First, famous findings should be checked for replication, especially when the original samples were small or unusual. Second, correlation does not establish causation, and associations can shrink when other factors are measured. Third, children's behavior makes sense in context: a child who grabs a treat may be responding reasonably to an environment in which promises are not kept, food is uncertain or adults are unpredictable.

What This Means for Mateo

Mateo's quick cracker tells his teachers very little. He may have been hungry, he may not have understood the instruction or he may have learned that waiting does not pay. A teacher guided by the research would watch his behavior across many situations, learn about his home and build a classroom in which adults reliably keep their word. If he still struggles to wait, his teachers can teach strategies such as singing a song or looking away, which the original studies found helpful. They would not predict his future from one snack.

Conclusion

The marshmallow research shows how child development moves from a striking finding to a more careful understanding. Mischel, Shoda and Rodriguez found that waiting predicted later competence, Watts, Duncan and Quan showed that the link was smaller and largely explained by family and cognitive factors and Kidd, Palmeri and Aslin showed that children's experiences with adults shape their choices. Theories guide the questions, and different research designs together reveal which answers hold.

References

Kidd, C., Palmeri, H., & Aslin, R. N. (2013). Rational snacking: Young children's decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition, 126(1), 109-114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.004

Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. L. (1989). Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244(4907), 933-938. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.2658056

Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J., & Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the marshmallow test: A conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes. Psychological Science, 29(7), 1159-1177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661