Children's learning about the balance scale

We present a detailed look at children's learning about the balance scale. In our study, as children explored the balance scale, they acquired and built on special-case and context-specific knowledge. Before making general and context-independent observations, they made more local observations.We contrast our findings with two previous analyses of children's knowledge Inhelder and Piaget, 1958; Siegler, 1978] about the balance scale in light of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and its acquisition. Educational implications of all three analyses are considered.