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Piaget has characterized two aspects of children's theory of the world: animism, the tendency to regard objects as living and endowed with will, and artificialism, the idea that everything is made by someone for a special purpose. When a six-year-old is asked what the sun is made of, the reply is 'Of fire.' But how? 'Because there is fire up there.' But where did the fire come from? 'From the sky.' How was the fire made in the sky? 'It was lighted with a match .. .' There is a spontaneous tendency towards animism, for the child to believe as if nature were charged with purpose and as if chance did not exist. When a child says the sun follows us, the child attributes purposiveness to the sun. But when asked 'What is a fork?', the reply is 'It is for eating with' - an artificialist response.

In very general terms, children learn by direct experience, authority, intuition and logic. All of these lead to a common-sense view of the world, but not to a scientific one.

Studies have shown that a number of key reasoning processes need to be learned before children can grasp the basic nature of the physical world. These include the idea of variables in thinking about causal events, together with the necessity of changing the variables one at a time if a proper comparison of their effects is to be made (in thinking about a simple case of equilibrium, such as in balancing a beam, for example, there are four variables - two weights and two distances from the point of support); the idea of probability and correlation; and the whole idea of abstract models to explain, for example, the solar system or the weather . None of these ideas is really natural, and when children have learned these ideas their success in science tests improves dramatically.