Conservation (psychology)
Conservation refers to a logical thinking ability that allows a person to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size, according to the psychologist Jean Piaget.
This stage of cognitive development is characterized by children focusing on a single, salient dimension of height or length, while ignoring other important attributes of an object.
[1][3] For conservation of number, the task designed to test children involves a set of several sticks or round counters.
This stage of cognitive development is characterized by children focusing on a single, salient dimension of height or length, while ignoring other important attributes of an object.
[2] For conservation of solid quantity, the task designed to assess children involves two lumps of clay.
The experimenter places two equal balls of clay onto either side of a balance and shows that the weights are the same.
In the third stage, children have gained the ability to conserve, and recognize that height and width do not affect amount.
[8] This research highlights the importance of logical-reversible thought, an element necessary to conserve, as being a critical component to a child's ability to perform inverse mathematical problems fluently (5 + 2 = 7; 7 − 5 = 2).
[10] Another study looked at children from many countries (Australia, Netherlands, England, New Zealand, Poland, and Uganda) and tested for the ages at which conservation appears.
[11] A review of cross-cultural studies looking at Piagetian tasks supported this finding, and found that while the general stages of cognitive development outlined by Piaget do occur across cultures, the rate of development is not consistent across cultures and sometimes the final stage of formal operations is not reached by children in all cultures, due to lack of experiences which would help develop this kind of thinking.
[12] A great deal of care should be taken in cross-cultural examinations of conservation in order to avoid obtaining biased results.
[13] However another study suggests that their interpretation of the experimenter’s purpose may have conflicted with giving straightforward answers to the standard Piagetian questions because - except in school interrogation - Wolof people seldom ask questions to which they already know the answers.
[14] When presented with the task as language-learning questions about the meaning of quantity terms such as "more" and "the same", the responses reflected understanding of conservation.
[15] The conservation tasks (and hence Piaget's theory) have been criticized on a number of fronts in regards to research methods.
[17] The importance of context was also emphasized by researchers who altered the task so that a 'naughty teddy' changed the array rather than an experimenter themselves.
