Purpose: The authors investigated mental representations of Piagetian conservation tasks in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing peers. Children with SLI have normal nonverbal intelligence; however, they exhibit difficulties in Piagetian conservation tasks. The authors tested the hypothesis that conservation…

Examines questions about reported findings that the natural number concept derives from a prior understanding of ordination rather than a prior understanding of cardination. (GO)

This study identified new methodological variables which might affect the responses of second and third grade children to Piagetian conservation tasks. (GO)

Significant gains in conservation of number, amount, mass and weight were made by 53 previously nonconserving first graders who either simply observed conservers' performance on mass and weight problems or argued with conservers about these problems. (Author/CW)

This study demonstrates that, given the assumption that the child does have some understanding of both height and amount, many nonconservers do give correct reversal judgments for both. Also, reversibility data from this study do not support the theory that a new stage appears when water conservation judgments appear. (Author/ED)

Variations of the screening method developed by Piaget and Frank made it possible to systematically vary the number and type of perceptual cues in the conservation of liquid quantity task. Results of testing 192 kindergarten and first graders suggest that the development of conservation involves several levels, beginning with a concept which can…

Attempts to account for discrepancies between results of the Hall and Kingsley experiment (1968), (in which the majority of college students did not resist extinction in a contrived instance of non-conservation of weight), and the Miller, Schwartz and Stewart experiment (1973), (in which the majority did resist extinction). (ED)

Two hypotheses concerning children's treatment of "less" as a synonym of "more" were tested with 4- and 5-year-olds. It was hypothesized: (1) that the "less"-"more" distinction can be taught; and (2) that conservation is dependent on the capacity to distinguish "more" and "less". (Author/CS)

This article discusses the results of an earlier experiment which demonstrated a relationship between children's prior understanding of the compensation rule and their tendency to benefit from conservation training. These earlier results are then compared to the results of this experiment which employed different procedures and found no such…

This study assessed the recognition by conserving and nonconserving first graders, of true and false permise and inference sentences following story presentations. Conservers performed slightly better than nonconservers on sentences other than true inference sentences, thus indicating that concrete mental operations are related to the process of…

Sixty kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade children were required to construct numerically equivalent collections and to determine asymmetric-transitive relations among nonequivalent collections, using two strategies of cardinal number: correspondence and counting. A novel "collinear correspondence" task was also introduced and compared…

Effective management of the flow of information to decision-makers in an organization, and from them to the implementers of decisions, can result in conservation of resources and improved productivity. Payoffs in the 1980's will come from relating the management of information to the quality of the decisions made where the information is used.…

Suggests an approach to the assessment of children's conservation ability which analyzes the stimulus variables and cognitive performance. The analysis of performance variables focuses on the role of attention. (MP)

The relationship between concrete operational thought and concept attainment was investigated in second grade students. (GO)