There is a marked distinction in the cognitive skills and the reasoning ability of the children used in the nickel and dime experiment.
Many fail to believe or accept that size does matter, especially to a young child, whose main concern is getting the biggest of everything – even nothing. After independently showing my two years and five months old nephew a nickel and then a dime, I asked him which one he would like for me to give him. Naturally, he chose the nickel, due to the fact that it was bigger in circumference than the dime. Despite the fact that the dime had more monetary value, he does not have the capacity to understand the difference. In his mind he thought that the bigger coin would be of more value than the smaller one. In this stage the child uses symbolic thought to understand the world.…show more content… 50). Children are egocentric he says, they think of everything only as it relates to them. I asked my nephew why he didn’t choose the dime and his response was because he could not buy as many toys as he would if he chose the dime. An older child or adult would know that the dime (10 cents) is worth more than the nickel (5 cents). Piaget tells us that, “the child will be perfectly comfortable with his own reasoning despite any attempts to tell him otherwise” (Mooney, 2013, pp. 86,
