What is conservation? Who first investigated conservation? What was involved in conservation tasks?

What are the limitations of conservation tasks? In very simple terms conservation is the ability to think logically. Looking with more depth, conservation refers to a persons understanding that changing somethings quantity superficially does not mean that there has been a change to its quantity. For example, if a person was presented with a row of 5 chairs, then chairs re-arranged into a circle there would still be 5 chairs. The first person to investigate conservation was Jean Piaget. Piaget is a Swiss Developmental Psychologist born in 1896 whose work mainly focused on epistemological studies with children. Meaning, he was concerned with knowledgewhat is it?, how do we aquire it?, what do ppl know?, how do we know what we know? Etc. Piaget wished to test whether children have conservation. He did this by developing conservation tasks. Many forms of conservation tasks.conservation of volume, number, length and so on. One famous example is the conservation task investigating volume. Pre-school and school children were shown two identical glasses with identical volumes of water in each. Asked if there was same volume of water in both Answered yes Then experimenter poured water from one glass into a taller, skinnier glass. Child then asked if there was same amount of water in both. Piaget found that children of ages 6 or 7 plus answered correctly. He therefore concluded that it is about this age that children have conservation, and can therefore think logically to some extent. I say this because at this age, the children still relied on physical objects to come to the right conclusion. He also noted that at the ages of 6 upwards, children had a concept of reversibility. Which involves the ability to cancel out the effects of a perceptual change by imagining the opposite change Piaget used his reversibility ideas to formulate the Principle of Invariance. This principle states that there are relevant and irrelevant changes associated with quantity. For instance, addition and subtraction are relevant changes (since they change the quantity of an object or objects), while pouring the same volume of water into a different glass, are irrelevant changes (since they change only physical properties, not quantity). Also Piaget noted that children were no longer dominated by perception (as in the height of the liquid), but have an understanding of how a greater height of the water is COMPENSATED by the smaller width of the water.

These findings by Piaget lead him to develop 4 key stages in cognitive development: The sensorimotor stage. Lasting from birth to the age of 2. Children explore the world through movement and the 5 senses. Kids are very egocentric here, so cannot see the world from anothers point of view. There are 6 sub-stages of the sensorimotor stage involving simple reflexes, circular reactions, developing co-ordination, growing in curiosity and internalisation of schemes. Next stage: the pre-operational stage: lasting from 2years of age to about 7 years old. Here the child aquires motor skills. Egocentrism begins to weaken. As shown by the conservation task results, children here cannot conserve or use logical thinking. Can only attend to one aspect of a situation- centration The third stage is the concrete operational stage (REMEMBER: Stage before conservation): Between the ages of 7 and 12 children begin to think logically. However, due to being very concrete in their thoughts they can only think logically with practical aids. Children at this stage are no longer egocentric. The last stage in Piagets stages of cognitive development is the formal operational stage. This is from the age of 12 onwards. Here children, or adolesents now, develop abstract reasoning and thought. They can conserve with ease and think logically mentally. Piaget found that children in the pre-operational stage relied on perception. Whereas, children who had shifted to the concrete operational stage focused more on logic. He also found that pre-operational children had problems with transitive inference. Let me explain Piaget tested children by showing them two RodsRod A was longer than Rod B. He then hid Rod A and showed the children a Rod C which was shorter than Rod B. He then asked if Rod A was longer or shorter than Rod C. Pre-operational children found this task very difficultinferring in Piagets opinion that pre-operational children have not developed logic yet. As with all theories, Piagets conservation tasks has been criticised by several academics. Firstly, back to Piagets claim that pre-operational children struggle with tarnsitive interference. Bryant and Trabasso argued that many children in the task with the rods did not struggle because they had not got to the stage where they developed conservation but simply struggled to remember all the information and the length of the rods. This led them to repeat Piagets rod experiment but instead of asking them the questions after only seeing the rods once, Bryant and Trabasso asked them after they were convinced the children could remember. This resulted in almost all the children answering the question correctly, and therefore displaying conservation.

Could it be that memory, not logic determines how well children performed on the conservation tasks. Although doubt that a child could forget the amount of water in the conservation of vlume task so quickly. Wheldall and Poborca (1980) claimed children often fail conservation tasks because they dont understand the question due to their limited understanding of language. They replicated the conservation of volume task, however, this time non-verbally. Only 28% of 6 and 7 yr olds showed conservation with the standard verbal version, but in the revised non-verbal experimnet 50% showed conservation. Showing, misunderstanding of language is one factor involved in non-conservation. Following on from this, McGarrigle argued that children had some difficulty with the wording of the questions asked in conservation tasks. To investigate this he carried out the sleeping cows experiment. This involved children being presented with 4 toy cows. 3 black and one white. All four cows were laid on their side sleeping. The experimentor asked the children if there were more black or white cows. Only 25% of 6 year olds could answer this correctly. Next the psychologist asked if there were more black or sleeping cows, and this time 48% of the 6 year old children answered correctly. This significant difference in percentage shows that perhaps conservation tasks are not testing logic but whether or not a child understands the question being asked. Rose and Blank (1974) and Samuel and Bryant (1984) suggested that children fail because they find being asked 2 questions confusing. May think because experimenter is asking same question again is because they want a different answer. Samuel and Bryant studied over 200 children between 5 and 8.5 years. One group given the traditional 2 question conservation task, the other group only asked one question after the water was poured in the taller, thinner glass. Younger children did much better. But the older children still generally did better. However, perhaps the younger children were still intimidated by the experimenter and the unfamiliar situation, and were unable to cope as effectively as the older children. This may suggest that another factor determining childrens results in conservation tasks is confidence. McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974) showed that there can be a large discrepency between competence and performance in conservation tasks. They believed that children build-up a model of the world by formulating hypotheses that help them anticipate future events on the basis of past experiences. Therefore because the child has expectations about any situation, being asked the same question twice, particularly after an invstigator has stressed the situation has changed, they expect the answer to the question to have changed. This prompted McGarrigle and Donaldson to produce the Naughty Teddy experiment. Presented 6 year olds with 2 rows of counters, just like Piaget did in his conservation of numbers task.

Instead of an experimenter spreading one row of counters out, McGarriglle and Donaldson had a naughty teddy as its known to appear to accidently spread the counters out. They found that using the teddy 62% of children had conservation, whereas when repeating Piagets in a control test, they found only 18% of participants showed conservation. Perhaps this shows that in Piagets conservation task of numbers it seemed that the experimenter almost led them to say there was a change because the children were shown that the experimentor deliberatly altered the row of counters. McGarrigle and Donaldsons experiment shows that the performance in Piagets original experiment failed to reflect the underlying level of the childrens competence. Price-Williams, Gordon, and Ramirez (1969) found that children often show conservation of volume for substances they are familiar with faster than less familiar substances. They studied a group of mexican children whose parents were potters. They found that they had slow development of conservation of volume using the glasses of water, but fast development when a ball of clay was squashed and stretched into a sausage shape. This is inconsistent with Piagets stage-based account of cognitive development. I also feel that Piagets theory, if even correct is more descriptive than explanortory and if children develop conservation at the age of 6 or 7.i still wish to know why it is at this age and how they develop it. However, from Piagets work we can see that children do indeed go though various stages of development and that these stages are transitional. What is also worthwhile is that the difficulties that pre-operational children face have been identified (even if they have not been explained satisfactorily) and this information can be used to help children in education.