On the Acquisition of Understanding that Still Water is Horizontal.

Abstract

Piaget and Inhelder (1956) demonstrated that children less than nine years old have little understanding of the concepts of horizontal ity and verticality, despite the abundance of horizontal and vertical references in the environment. They reported research in which sub jects were shown a bottle one-quarter filled with water and asked to indicate the position of the water surface for bottles in various oblique orientations. Subjects who did not understand the concept of horizontally typically depicted the water surface in oblique positions. Piaget and Inhelder believed that understanding of horizontality de velops through several well-defined stages and is only fully achieved somewhere in late childhood coincident with the emergence of con crete operations. Since Piaget and Inhelder's (1956) early observations there have been no systematic developmental studies of the acquisition of horizontality. That is, recent water-level studies have tested subjects from a restricted age range (e.g., nursery school or second grade) and have been most concerned with the effectiveness of particular training conditions on the acquisition of horizontality (e.g., Beilin, Kagan, & Rabinowitz, 1966) or with the relationship between horizon tality and other concepts such as distance conservation (Shantz & Smock, 1966). Furthermore, there is evidence that some college stu dents, who should be expected to have mastered the necessary con crete operations, do not understand the concept of horizontality (Rebelsky, 1964), and may in fact have difficulty learning it (Thomas, Jamison, & Hummel, 1973). Such findings raise questions about Piaget's theory as well as about general learning theories which might predict that understanding should emerge earlier in life given the numerous environmental opportunities for discovering horizontality. In this paper. Studies I and II provide normative information on the development of horizontality, which allows for an evaluation of Piaget's stages and for differences due to age, sex, bottle shape, and

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