Talk:Conservation (psychology)

'They found that Piaget's methodology may well have produced some of the results he stated, but also that cognitive development is in fact age related'

Piaget's stages of development are age related as well so what is this supposed to mean?

A-level
"This study is used in A-level psychology"

Whaa? Is this about IB tests or something? Does it really belong in this article? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Special:Contributions/ (talk)

Student edits to begin
Greta Munger (talk) 14:51, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Proposed Updates and Sources Below are the sources I have gathered thus far about conservation; it is a mix of literature reviews, laboratory studies, textbooks, encyclopedias, and Piaget’s writing.

In my updates to the article I will explain the discovery of conservation in children and the development of the concept within developmental psychology. I plan to add images to help explain conservation of length and liquid. I will also define the different types of conservation and provide sources to support these findings. I will also discuss the age range when parts of conservation is thought to develop, and the prevalence of conservation in children across cultures. Although this article already has much of this information I will fully flesh out the article, and add subsections to make the article more readable. Given the very substantial amount of research present on this topic and the established nature of this topic in developmental psychology, I will undoubtedly find more things to cover as I proceed in editing as well.

Miller, S. A. (1976). Nonverbal assessment of Piagetian concepts. Psychological Bulletin, 83(3), 405-430. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.83.3.405

Brainerd, C. J., & Hooper, F. H. (1975). A methodological analysis of developmental studies of identity conservation and equivalence conservation. Psychological Bulletin, 82(5), 725-737. doi:10.1037/h0077070

Piaget, J., In Elkind, D., & In Flavell, J. H. (1969). Studies in cognitive development: Essays in honor of Jean Piaget. New York: Oxford University Press.

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1974). The child's construction of quantities: Conservation and atomism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Kennedy, W. A. (1971). Child psychology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.

Palermo, D. S., & Lipsitt, L. P. (1963). Research readings in child psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. specifically: Children's discovery of the conservation of mass, weight, and volume : Piaget replication study II / D. Elkind -- Experimental analysis of the development of the conservation of number / J.F. Wohlwill and R.C. Lowe -- Salkind, N. J. (2006). Encyclopedia of human development. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.

Pinard, A. (1981). The conservation of conservation: The child's acquisition of a fundamental concept. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smedslund, J. n. (1962). The acquisition of conservation of substance and weight in children: VII. Conservations of discontinuous quantity and the operations of adding and taking away. Scandinavian Journal Of Psychology, 3(2), 69-77. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9450.1962.tb01251.x

Hooper, F. H. (1969). Piaget's conservation tasks: The logical and developmental priority of identity conservation. Journal Of Experimental Child Psychology, 8(2), 234-249. doi:10.1016/0022-0965(69)90098-8

Goldschmid, M. L. (1973). A cross-cultural investigation of conservation. Journal Of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 4(1), 75-88. doi:10.1177/002202217300400106

Bucher, B., & Schneider, R. E. (1973). Acquisition and generalization of conservation by pre-schoolers, using operant training. Journal Of Experimental Child Psychology, 16(2), 187-204. doi:10.1016/0022-0965(73)90160-4

Macready, C., & Macready, G. B. (1974). Conservation of weight in self, others, and objects. Journal Of Experimental Psychology, 103(2), 372-374. doi:10.1037/h0036880

Page, A. (1973). Conservation of identity and equivalence among children from varying socio-economic backgrounds. Scientia Paedagogica Experimentalis, 10(1), 58-69.

Brainerd, C. J. (1973). Order of acquisition of transitivity, conservation, and class inclusion of length and weight. Developmental Psychology, 8(1), 105-116. doi:10.1037/h0033823

Wheldall, K., & Benner, H. (1993). Conservation without conversation revisited: A replication and elaboration of the Wheldall-Poborca findings on the nonverbal assessment of conservation of liquid quantity. Educational Psychology, 13(1), 49-58. doi:10.1080/0144341930130106 —Waterlily16 (talk) 20:22, 17 April 2014 (UTC)


 * It might be helpful to have brief history section where you explain Piaget's task using some of the references you list here (which are pretty old, and might not all be useful), the Encyclopedia of Human Development (2006) article might really suffice for that, and then also include sections about cross-cultural, educational applications and neuroscience. A quick look in PsycINFO turned up two nice modern articles
 * Houdé, O., Pineau, A., Leroux, G., Poirel, N., Perchey, G., Lanoë, C., & ... Mazoyer, B. (2011). Functional magnetic resonance imaging study of Piaget’s conservation-of-number task in preschool and school-age children: A neo-Piagetian approach. Journal Of Experimental Child Psychology, 110(3), 332-346. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2011.04.008
 * Wubbena, Z. C. (2013). Mathematical fluency as a function of conservation ability in young children. Learning And Individual Differences, 26153-155. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2013.01.013
 * Organization: remember that people hop around in reading Wikipedia articles, so make each little section as independent as you can
 * Methods: what kind of research supports these theories?  Some sections will need more method details than others, helpful to keep in mind these descriptions: 3 research methods (experiments vs correlation vs descriptive); 2 data-collection (self-report vs observation); 2 research settings (lab vs field)
 * Figures and tables: be thoughtful.  Wikicommons has lots of pictures that might be useful.  You cannot copy directly from journal articles (copyright violation), but you can recreate a figure and then donate it yourself.  I think figures will definitely help explain the conservation tasks, and so like that you already have that in your plan. Greta Munger (talk) 14:38, 22 April 2014 (UTC)


 * In the vein of providing a history of conservation's discovery and placement by Piaget, can you contextualize this task within the concrete operational phase and show how it's important/fits in to any other characteristics of this phase?
 * Adding more sections would definitely be helpful in making the article clearer and helping it flow.
 * "One who can conserve is able to reverse the transformation mentally and understand compensation." Can you explain this sentence? What does conservation have to do with compensation?
 * Can you answer how conservation appears in children? Does it show up overnight or occur more and more often? Are there stages, or is it an al of nothing phenomenon?
 * Adding information about Piaget's methodology would help explain his findings and his criticisms.
 * It would be informative to include information and examples about similarities and difference in conservation in weight, volume, length, etc Psychstar2014 (talk) 18:38, 23 April 2014 (UTC)