Reference no: EM131019425

Researchers in child development are interested in developing ways to increase the spatial temporal reasoning of preschool children. Spatial-temporal reasoning relates to the child's ability to visualize spatial patterns and mentally manipulate them over a time-ordered sequence of spatial transformations. This ability, often referred to as thinking in pictures, is important for generating and conceptualizing solutions to multi-step problems and is crucial in early child development. The researchers want to design a study to evaluate which of several methods proposed to accelerate the growth in spatial-temporal reasoning yields the greatest increase in a child's development in this area. There are three methods proposed: three months of playing piano lessons, three months of playing specially developed computer video games, and specially designed games in small groups supervised by a trained instructor. The researchers measure the effectiveness of the three programs by assessing the children and assigning them a reasoning score both before and after their participation in the program. The difference in these two scores is the response variable. A control group is also included to measure the change in reasoning for children not given any special instruction. A pilot study with only 20 students was to be conducted prior to the complete study to determine potential problems. Demonstrate how to assign 5 of the 20 students to each of the 4 types of instruction so that the assignment is completely random.