An empirical test of alternative claims by Bryant and Piaget concerning the development of invariance of quantities in 3- and 4-year-old children was made. Results support the Piagetian thesis in showing that those subjects respond with stereotypic strategies rather than by an invariance of number principle. (Author/JMB)

Displays that by themselves always elicited chance judgment of number were shown to three- to four-year-olds and six- to seven-year-olds. The first display was transformed into the second, and so on. Results indicated that three- to four-year-olds do not understand conservation of number because judgements of successive displays were independent…

This study is a partial replication and extension of research reported by Golomb and Cornelius in 1977. Training in the present study was significantly less effective than in the earlier research. Findings suggest experimenter and testing effects on performance. (RH)

In the first experiment, observations were made of children ages four-and-a-half to five-and-a-half years of age who were induced to use counting or matching in a Piagetian number conservation task. The spontaneous matching and counting behavior of a more mature but not yet conserving sample was investigated in the second experiment. (RH)

This study investigated the influence of knowledge of conservation on recall of an event by 4- to 7-year-old children. Changes in recall over time were found to follow an inconsistent pattern and seemed to be unrelated to changes in the subject's stage of development. (Author/JMB)

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…

In testing conservation of number in preschool children using both equality and inequality; 3- and 4-year-olds tended to use an acquiescence response set while 5- and 6-year-olds responded in terms of relative length. (ST)

In a replication study, children 3 and 4 years old were given verbal rule training in order to probe the importance of identity, reversibility, and compensation explanations in training number and length concepts. Among the results, as before, identity was found to be the most significant factor in conservation acquisition. (Author/RH)

Twenty children, 3-12 years old, were given a newly constructed interview on their concepts of human reproduction (social causality), in conjunction with Piaget-type tasks assessing physical conservation-identity, physical causality, and a new social identity task. The children's concepts of human reproduction appeared to proceed through a…

Study tests four predictions derived from Piaget's cognitive theory. (CB)

A combination of readiness and body-part training was the most effective in producing number conservation with external objects. (Authors)

Preschool children were trained to acquire transitivity, conservation, and class inclusion of length via feedback to their judgments. Feedback was found to facilitate the learning of all three concepts. (ST)