Conservation

Conservation refers to the feature of constancy or invariance of an object. It is the notion that a quantity stays the same despite changes in form or appearance. Educational psychologists study the concept of conservation in children as an important developmental milestone that is reached when a shift in cognitive thinking occurs. One of Jean Piaget's earliest and most important discoveries was that young children lacked the principle of conservation. Much research has been conducted to prove or disprove Piaget's theory of conservation.

While studying how children develop intelligence, Piaget discovered that young children do not understand that quantity, length, or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the items. He developed different tasks to further understand the concept of how children develop the principle of conservation. He looked at mass, number, volume, and area.

For the task of mass, the examiner presents a child with two round balls of clay equal in weight, size, and shape. The child is asked if the two balls are the same weight. The child is allowed to use a balance to assure the weight is equal if needed. The examiner then transforms one ball of clay into a flat pancake or a thin rope. The child is asked again if the two quantities of clay have the same weight and to give and explanation of why or why not.

For the task of number, the examiner presents the child with two equal rows of counters. The rows of counters are arranged side by side in one-to-one correspondence. The child is asked if the two rows are equal. The examiner then spreads one row of coins apart, and again asks the child if the two rows have equal amounts of coins.

The task to assess conservation of volume begins with showing the child two identical containers filled with the same amounts of liquid and asking the child if the amount of liquid is equal. Then, the liquid from one container is poured into a container that is taller and thinner than the other. The child is again asked if the amount of liquid is the same in both containers.

A fourth, less used, and less researched task used by Piaget was the ‘cows on a farm’ test for conservation of area. In this task, two identical farms were presented, each with a cow placed on it. The children were asked if each cow had the same amount of grass to eat. Then, Piaget would add little cubic farmhouses to each farm. On one farm he would line up the farmhouses in a tidy row, on the other farm, he would scatter the farms about on the grass. The child is then asked again if the cows have the same amount of grass to eat.

In each of the above tasks, the child's ability to recognize that certain physical properties do not change, or are conserved, even though they may undergo a physical transformation, is tested. Children who do not understand the principle of conservation will say that the quantity of mass, number, volume, or area has changed.

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