Conservation
Another of Jean Piaget’s classic studies involved what he termed conservation.
This is the ability to understand that, when nothing is taken away or added, then even if the appearance of something changes, there is the same amount as before. Conservation tasks involve showing a child an amount of something, changing its shape in some way and then asking if the amount has changed or is the same.
Look at an example of this sort of task and see what happens:
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Piaget believed that difficulties with conservation are caused by children concentrating on only one of the dimensions (e.g. height) and failing to take account of the other dimension (e.g. width). However, there have been criticisms that the tasks Piaget used might have had what are termed demand characteristics, this is shown on the next page.
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