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“Stevenson and Stigler – psychologists who studied Japanese and Chinese education in the early 1990s – recount an experiment they attempted to carry out on persistence in Japanese and American children. Their intention was to give students from each country a maths problem that was unsolvable in order to see how long they would keep attempting it for. However, Stevenson and Stigler weren't able to complete their study, because the Japanese teachers convinced them to drop it after trying it out with a few children. They'd found that the children refused to give up, and had carried on attempting to solve the problem for far longer than it was fair to let them try for.” — Lucy Crehan
Stevenson and Stigler – psychologists who studied Japanese and Chinese education in the early 1990s – recount an experiment they attempted to carry out on persistence in Japanese and American children. Their intention was to give students from each country a maths problem that was unsolvable in order to see how long they would keep attempting it for. However, Stevenson and Stigler weren't able to complete their study, because the Japanese teachers convinced them to drop it after trying it out with a few children. They'd found that the children refused to give up, and had carried on attempting to solve the problem for far longer than it was fair to let them try for.