Overview

– Defined as the ability to keep in mind what stays the same and what changes in an object after it has changed in appearance. If someone is able to conserve then they are able to reverse the transformation mentally and understand compensation.

– Refers to a logical thinking ability which becomes evident in children aged 7–12 during the concrete operations stage of their development.

– Determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size.

– Conservation Tasks are used to test a child’s ability to see that some properties are conserved after an object undergoes a physical transformation.

– Piaget’s most famous Conservation Task involved showing a child two beakers, both of which were identical and contained the same amount of coloured liquid.

• A child was asked whether the two beakers had the same amount of liquid. Liquid from one of the glasses was poured into a taller, thinner glass.

• The child was then asked whether there was still the same amount of liquid in both glasses.

• A child who can conserve would answer the amount is the same.

Piaget suggested that confusion was born from a pre-operational child’s inability to understand the notion of reversibility, which is the ability to see the reversal of a physical transformation as well as the transformation itself.

Criticism

– Conservation Task answers reflect the children’s cultural expectations and the context of interchanges with adults, and children’s understanding of the word “more”.

– The ages at which children are able to complete conservation tasks has been questioned by subsequent research.

– Research has suggested that asking the same question twice leads young children to change their answer. They assume that they are being asked again because they answered wrong the first time.

– The importance of context was also emphasized by researchers who altered the task so that a teddy’ bear posed the question rather than an experimenter themselves. This seemed to give children a clear reason for the second question being asked. In fact, in this scenario, 4 year old children were able to demonstrate knowledge of the conservation.

– Cross-cultural differences found in the Conservation Task, led Piaget to revise his claim of universal stages, allowing for contextual variability, depending on experience in particular domains.