Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Conservation Test

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development places preschool age children in the Preoperational Stage. A defining characteristic of this stage is that children do not show consistent logical reasoning.
Conservation is that the shape or arrangement of an object does not change the volume.
Children in the preoperational stage do not understand the laws of conservation. They will answer incorrectly to tests like these I performed with Westley.
They answer incorrectly because of centration - the pay attention to (concentrate) just one aspect at a time.
Here, Westley is focusing on the height of the water and height of the play dough
Preschool children also show irreversibility- they are unable to reverse the experiment in their head to answer logically. Even if the test is redone before them (as the water glass test was with Westley) they will still answer incorrectly.
Typically between the ages or 5-7 children make a shift and can think logically in concrete situations like this.

1 comment:

Jenny said...

Awesome illustrative video, Gina!