Three- to 7-year-old children were trained through reinforcement to select the more or less numerous of two rows of squares. All children successfully judged relative numerosity when number covaried with length or density, but only concrete operational children were successful when numbers did not covary with other dimensions. (Author/DB)

Piaget's conservation paradigm was used to assess five- to seven-year-old children's understanding of the permanence of various kinship roles. Children's conservation was studied by applying certain transformations on single- and multiple-kinship role combinations. Kinship conservation developed gradually in this age range. Females' performance…

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)

Ten retarded children (9 to 14 years old) participated in a training program to help them acquire the ability to conserve number. At the end of the training program, and nine weeks later, a significant number of students in the training group acquired the ability to conserve number. (Author)

Replicates the study by McGarrigle and Donaldson (1975). Considers several objections to McGarrigle and Donaldson's claim that the tasks they used did in fact test the child's ability to conserve number. A procedure free from these objections was employed in a second experiment. Discusses implications for the social psychology of the conservation…

Attractive stimuli and fantasy instructions were used in an attempt to manipulate children's involvement in the outcomes of their number and liquid conservation judgments. (Author/DB)

The study investigated the effects of basic concepts training on conservation acquisition in 41 kindergarten children (17 White boys, 15 White girls, 6 Black girls, and 5 Black boys). Only the conservation training program resulted in significant effects, and that was for the White students alone. (Author)

The "magic" paradigm was devised to assess conservation of number in young children. Subjects were 32 three- to four-year-old children. (MP)

Examined seriation, conservation, and theory of mind abilities in 16 adolescents and adults with autism, in 16 adolescents and adults with mental retardation, and in 16 normally developing children. Found that participants with autism performed better than participants with mental retardation on seriation, while no differences emerged between…

Reports on an exploratory study of the ideas that students in the fourth semester of engineering have about conservation. Reviews the Piagetian position on the importance of conservations in logical operational structures in child development. Discusses the development of conservations in science during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and…

Results of two experiments with five-year-olds indicated that: (1) conservation can be quickly taught with lasting results; (2) training on a limited range of exemplars will produce generalized correct responses to other, untrained classes of conservation problems; and (3) children's explanations of their judgments change as a result of exposure…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) of five- to seven-year-old girls were measured while the girls performed a visual selective attention task and a Piagetian conservation task. Results suggested more anterior ERP sources for nonconservers than conservers during early stimulus analysis, and more lateralized ERP sources for conservers than…

A central component in the young child's construction of a number system is an understanding of correspondence. Although current research demonstrates that preschool children use correspondence in a variety of tasks, the nature of the relationship between the use of correspondence action patterns and the use of correspondence as a quantifier is…

An investigation was made of the extent to which mental operations involved in quantitative conservation and pretense play affect the development of gender constancy. The research design included three phases: a pretest establishing subjects' levels of conservation and gender understanding, a training phase, and conservation and gender constancy…

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…