Three studies of preadolescents and college students found that many children and adults failed to give logically correct answers when presented with misleading weight conservation questions. The results show the importance of suggestibility and context. (MDM)

Children 3.5 to 5.5 years of age who were unable to conserve length with Piaget's classical task did conserve length with parallel nonverbal tasks. Findings suggest that "preoperational" children apparently do not fail to conserve length because of centration, misleading perceptual information, or immature cognitive operations regarding…

Thirty mildly retarded children (mean age 9 years) participated in a study in which 24 of the children were trained to a prespecified criterion on one of three logical operations tasks involving length: identity conservation, equivalence conservation, or transitivity. (Author)

To discover what aspects of number conservation tasks prevent young children from conserving, two components of number conservation tasks were investigated. A test was made of the following two hypotheses: (1) the frequency of conservation responses varies significantly with the materials used, (2) the frequency of conservation responses varies…

Investigated was the distinction between identity conservation and equivalence conservation in 180 preschool, kindergarten and third grade students. Ss were assigned to one of six different counterbalanced orders of presentation for the conservation task battery. The factors were age, task (identity/equivalence), criterion (judgment only/judgment…

Examines the imaging processes that children at different operatory levels use on a spatial rotation task. Subjects were 80 elementary school girls ranged in age from 5 to 10.2 years. (MP)

Several studies have shown that the elderly do not perform well on the Piagetian problems of logical thinking; the present set of studies aimed at demonstrating that the elderly maintain the competence to solve such problems. The first study performed by the authors assessed performance of 60 noninstitutionalized middle-class elderly females on…

To investigate the development of function concepts and their relation to mathematical and logical abilities typically acquired during the age period of five to seven years, children were tested on nonnumerical function tasks, numerical tasks, and aspects of logical reasoning. (PCB)

Even among individuals operating at Piaget's highest cognitive level (Formal Operations Stage) there is a range of behaviors on important cognitive characteristics. Various substages and their performance criteria are suggested. (JD)

This study is a longitudinal follow-up analysis of children's performances on a number of Piagetian concrete operations tasks dealing with conservation and transitive inference. Subjects were 102 children selected from kindergarten and grades 1, 3, and 4. (Author/MP)

This study was based on the following assumptions: (1) functioning of the brain's left hemisphere, because of its logical, verbal mode, facilitates conservation reasoning; (2) functioning of the brain's right hemisphere, because of its nonverbal, spatial mode, inhibits conservation reasoning; (3) visual input from the left eye will reach the left…

The author examines Novak's position that science and mathematics educators should discard Piaget's theory of intellectual development in favor of Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning as a guide for teaching practice and research. (PB)

University students were administered three Piagetian tasks and a spatial relations test, the Revised Minnesota Paper Form Board. Students' American College Test (ACT) mathematics scores were also recorded. A measure of conservation of weight, administered individually, was the first Piagetian task. Two paper and pencil tests of progressively…

Two experiments tested whether children fail to make transitive inferences because they forget the premises. Children did not justify incorrect inferences by incorrect premises. Results between nontransitive and transitive inferers parallelled similar studies with nonconserver- conserver dyads and were viewed as reinforcing the commonality between…

Five Inhelder-Piaget formal operations tasks were analyzed to determine the extent that the formal operational skills they assess were ordered into a stable hierarchy generalizable across samples of subjects. Subjects were 34 collegiate gymnasts (19 males, 15 females), and 22 students (1 male, 21 females) from a university nursing program.…