The influence of perceptual factors and language comprehension on quantity judgments (number conservation) was assessed in children, aged 2-5. (ST)

Indicated that early conservation was predictive of later reading performance. (RB)

Research supported by National Science Foundation grant GE-3 to the University of Minnesota.

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…

The effects of different conditions of peer interaction on the conservation judgments of first and second grade children were investigated. Children were subjected to either a control group situation or one of four types of peer interaction (cognitive conflict, social interaction, modeling, or cognitive dissonance) in which they were presented…

This monograph was written for the Conference on the New Instructional Materials in Physics, held at the University of Washington in summer, 1965. It is intended for college students who are not preparing to become professional physicists. The monograph contains three chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the law of inertia for objects at rest and in…

The author attempts to analyze and synthesize the literature on the development of conservation (Piaget) in children in order to aid its use as a routine assessment instrument of an important aspect of cognitive development. The nature of conservation, a review of the literature, task variables, and training variables are discussed. The author…

Tested was the hypothesis that science instruction based on task analysis will lead to the acquisition of the ability to perform certain Piaget volume tasks which have been characterized as requiring formal operations for their solutions. A Test on Formal Operations and a Learning Hierarchies Test were given to fourth- and sixth-grade students in…

This document describes experimental attempts to teach young children the concepts of conservation of number. Subjects were 48 nursery school children who were divided into experimental and control groups. All children were individually pretested for conservation, after which the experimental group alone received two training sessions. The…

Twenty-six children ranging in age from 6 to 12 years whose tested IQ's were over 160 were tested on three Piagetian tasks of advanced concrete operations and two tests of formal operations. All children passed all concrete operations problems, but only four of the oldest boys passed the formal operations tasks. Findings are discussed in terms of…

The general objective of this study was to study Piaget's notion of the sequential development of number conservation in 85 children averaging 5.9 years of age. The question addressed was to determine if a set of ten equal addition conservation of number tasks were scalable. A large coefficient of reproducibility, .912, was computed. Other indices…

The purpose was to determine whether different levels of education, race, and sex affect the degree of conservation of mass, weight, and volume attained by minimally educated adults. Subjects were 30 white and 30 black females and 30 white and 30 black males enrolled in Adult Basic Education classes, with 40 subjects each at grade levels 0-3, 4-6,…

The relationship between conservation and achievement is examined on specific tests and test items on the Stanford Achievement Test Battery used in the elementary years. Specifically, performance on two tests (Word Meaning and Arithmetic Concepts) were analyzed according to subjects level of thinking (concrete or formal) for total score,…

This study investigated children's conceptions of death from a developmental perspective. Subjects were 170 children from grades K-4. Children were tested for conservation and interviewed, following story presentations about an elderly woman's death, to assess their understanding of three concepts concerning death: irrevocability, cessation of…

The article describes research which attempted to discover whether emotionally disturbed children functioned at Piagetian levels of abstract thought similar to normal children. (CD)