The influence of the ability to conserve length in the development of a size concept was investigated in males and females aged 4 years through 9 years. (GO)

Researchers investigated the effects of sex differences on the relationship between conservation ability and the reading and linguistic awareness of five-year-old children. Findings of this study and others consistently support the hypothesis that conservation ability correlates more highly with reading in girls than in boys. (Author/PP)

In eight experiments, judgments of rectangle area by five-year-olds followed a reliable adding rule: height + width. In collateral work, the children judged the amount of liquid in a glass by a height-only rule. Implications for the Piagetian theories of centration and compensation are drawn. (SJL)

A 3-year longitudinal study assessed cognitive changes among rural children 3 to 5 years old and validated the construct validity of the Nebraska Wisconsin Cognitive Assessment Battery (NEWCAB). Multistage area sampling techniques were used with a repeated measures, control group design. Participants in the sample were 40 3-year-olds, 57…

Examined were effects of advance organizer (AO) instruction on acquisition of conservation concepts in 3- and 4-year-olds. Participants were 28 children who were equally divided into experimental and control groups, pretested, and found to be nonconservers. A sequence of two AO lessons and related learning activities was presented to the…

The development of children's understanding of the permanence of various social roles was examined in 16 four- and 16 five-year-old children. A social role conservation battery consisting of 12 items on the permanence of self-identity, gender, child and sibling roles was given under three temporal conditions: the past (i.e., when you were a baby,…

This paper briefly reports on a series of studies that explore the relationship between symbolic or pretend modes of reasoning and cognitive processes which underlie conservation of quantity. It is hypothesized that the mental transformations which the child makes while playing a game of make-believe, namely, the transformation from his original…

This paper reviews literature related to two questions: (1) How do preschoolers acquire numerical concepts? (2) What range of basic numerical knowledge do beginning kindergarteners possess? The first section briefly highlights main ideas of learning theories. The second section discusses Piaget's concept of conservation of number and how young…

The purpose of this study was to test training techniques designed (1) to induce conservation of discontinuous quantity in children, and (2) to induce ability to take different social roles. Also tested was this hypothesis: successfully training children in conservation will improve their ability to take different social roles, and conversely,…

Studies five-year-olds' relative number judgements of small and large number displays with and without perceptual aids. Children were found to respond to local rather than global density differences and to benefit from the provision of perceptual aids on both small and large number displays. (Author/AS)

In this cross-cultural research tests of the effects of stimulus familiarity on a conservation of area task in rural Guatemala are made. Performance on the conservation of area task is compared with performance on other types of conservation. Changes in performance over a one-month interval are reported. (SM)

Assessing Markman's hypothesis that the organizational principles underlying collection concepts facilitate children's performance on cognitive tasks requiring part-whole comparisons, three experiments indicated that the facilitative effect of collection labels appears to be specific to the class-inclusion task. Results suggest that Markman's…

The effects of advance organizer instruction on the acquisition of number, mass, area, quantity, and length conservation concepts in 3- and 4-year-old children are examined. Participating in the experiment were 28 children, a total of 14 in respective experimental and control groups. All children were pretested and determined to be nonconservers.…

A study of children's ability to conserve gender identity was made to: (1) investigate whether constancy would be achieved according to the developmental sequence proposed by Kohlberg (1965) and found in subsequent studies; (2) see if the pattern of conservation of referent-type followed the same sequence found in previous studies; (3) assess age…