Conservation & Class Inclusion

Q: Conservation

__Piaget__ showed that the two important skills of conservation and class inclusion developed in the concrete operational stage. Researchers have since replicated or conducted similar studies to either prove or disprove his theories.

Q: Class Inclusion

__Piaget__ showed that the two important skills of conservation and class inclusion developed in the concrete operational stage. Researchers have since replicated or conducted similar studies to either prove or disprove his theories.

Test yourself on Conservation & Class Inclusion

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Conservation

Piaget showed that the two important skills of conservation and class inclusion developed in the concrete operational stage. Researchers have since replicated or conducted similar studies to either prove or disprove his theories.

Conservation

Conservation is the concept where quantities - such as number of things, length, volume, etc. - stay the same even though they can appear different.
According to Piaget, conservation develops in the concrete operational stage.

Volume

A first example of conservation is volume.
If a glass with a certain volume of water is tall and thin, compared to a short and fat glass with the same volume of water, a child without the conservation skill would say the taller glass has more water.
Even if someone pours water from the tall glass to the short glass, the child would say the tall glass has more water as it appears bigger.

Five penny task

A second example of a conservation task is the five penny task.
Imagine five pennies, evenly spaced about 1cm apart. Then they are rearranged 5 cm apart.
The child would understand that there is still the same amount of pennies even though they are further apart.
A child unable to demonstrate conservation would not understand this.

Area

A final example of conservation is area.
If a child is shown a cracker, then someone splits it in half and presents them with the two halves, they may mistake the two smaller crackers as being larger.
They say this because two is more than one, even though they are of identical area to one larger cracker.
A child showing conservation would not make this mistake.

Concrete operational stage

Children at the concrete operational stage will not make these mistakes, whereas a child at the previous preoperational stage would.
This is a distinguishing characteristic between the two stages.

McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974)

McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974) did a similar study to the five penny task.
They introduced a puppet (Naughty Teddy) who ‘accidentally’ pushed the pennies to make the row appear longer.
With the teddy, children younger than the concrete operational stage (preoperational stage) said the numbers of pennies were the same.
So it could be said they did understand conservation.

Class Inclusion

Class inclusion

Class inclusion is when a child understands that objects can simultaneously belong to two categories.
- An example of class inclusion would be that all cats are animals.

Piaget and Szeminska (1941)

Piaget and Szeminska (1941) investigated class inclusion by giving children 20 wooden beads, 18 of which were brown and two white.
They then asked three questions:
- “Are all the beads wooden?”
- “Are there more brown beads or more white beads?”
- “Are there more brown beads or wooden beads?”

Piaget and Szeminska (1941) results

Their results showed that children above seven (in the concrete operational stage) could correctly answer all three questions.
Children below seven (preoperational stage) did not correctly answer the third question.
- They could not distinguish between the whole class (wooden) and the subclass (brown), so could not show the skill of class inclusion.

McGarrigle et al. (1978)

As with the conservation study, this study was repeated.
Many scientists criticised the final question as being confusing. - McGarrigle et al. (1978) created a series of experiments that were less confusing and more accessible.
The McGarrigle et al. study found similar results to Piaget and Szeminska.