Length Conservation Of Children In Kindergarten: A Retest And Training Study On Piaget's Tasks

The goal of this study was to solve the following questions: retesting Piaget's length conservation experiment in order to grasp the level of children's development; comparing importance of three conservation rules (identity, reversibility, and compensation) in length conservation tasks; examining the effect of feedback and verbal rule instruct in conservation training. The study used 183 preschoolers as subjects by the method of experiment. The results showed:(1)The retest study almost reconfirmed Piaget's conclusions: Preschoolers can't understand the concept of length conservation, and the development undergoes several stages, and their thinking was still and one-sided. However, the subjects in study improved slightly, with higher rate of correction in each age group; also, the intermediate stage found by Piaget was not very evident.(2)By analyzing the explanation of the children who answered correctly, it was found that the three important conservation rules were all used by children. However, the importance of the three rules was different: identity was used most frequently, reversibility the second and compensation was used least.(3)In the training research, although examined by the four criteria insisted by Piaget, the two training methods (feedback and verbal rule instruction) both had training effect to some extent. In the short run, the effect of the two was obvious; considering the generalization, both can make children generalize to the untrained concept; considering the duration, for the trained concept, the two methods were both effective, but for the untrained concept, children's scores declined slightly, especially those under the method of feedback.(4) Considering the rate of correction in every training session, the combination of both feedback and verbal rule instruction training methods made children's learning most effective.