Development of Chinese preschoolers' understanding of biological phenomena: Growth and aliveness

Chinese preschoolers' understandings of the biological phenomena "growth" a nd "aliveness" were investigated. Seventy-two 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old subjec ts with equal numbers of boys and girls in each age group were selected fro m different socioeconomic backgrounds. The same children participated in th e three experiments reported in this study so that both individual and intr a-individual differences could be explored. Multiple methods, including pic ture-choice, retrieval, and classification tasks were used. The results sho w that 6-year-old children could distinguish living and nonliving things on bath the growth and aliveness tasks, even when tested by different methods , whereas 4- and 5-year-olds' performance varied across tasks and methods. Children whose parents had higher levels of formal education performed bett er than their counterparts, bur the difference declined as age increased.