Piaget's Conservation Tasks and Childhood Justification

Introduction: Piaget's Theory Under Scrutiny

Jean Piaget's theories of child development have been generalized and widely accepted across the domains of psychology, child development, and education. It would not be inappropriate to label him as one of the most significant thinkers in the modern practice of these fields. Yet his work is not unassailable. He based the majority of his observations on the study of his own children, and some critics have argued that he insufficiently explores the impact of cultural differences and the issue of giftedness among children. Intellectually gifted children may move through the stages differently, or perhaps with more self-awareness (Cohen & Kim, 1999). Piaget's theories have remained under scrutiny, for these and other reasons, since their inception. To this day there is little agreement as to the precise accuracy of his stages or the way in which they may be measured and determined.

Piaget himself measured the shift between stages by a child's ability to succeed in specific theory tasks that demonstrate certain cognitive skills, such as the ability to comprehend different points of view or the ability to conserve numbers, area, volume, and so forth in relation to objects.

Research Supporting Piaget's Stages

Many developmental studies have utilized Piaget's theories and found them to be reliable. For example, Uri Fidelman (1995) performed one study in which kindergarten children were tested for performance on the Piaget-designed stage task, asked to conserve numbers over varying spatial arrangements. At the same time they were tested for the development of right-brain or left-brain capability. Over the following year the children were tested again, and many of them were seen to shift stages and begin to conserve numbers. Those who underwent such a shift also experienced changes in the development of their brain hemispheres, with males and females becoming more alike at that point. This study, in addition to contributing to gender and sex research, seems to indicate a real biological core to Piaget's theories. Of course, it could be argued that the changes in cognition and hemisphere capability were coincidental — both attributable to the child's general maturation rather than directly linked to one another.

Social Pressure and Its Effect on Children's Responses

Arguments against a strict reliance on Piaget's stages have amassed in the years since he introduced the theory. The strongest of these arguments point out that, though his stages may have some legitimacy as a general outline of childhood development, they vastly underrate the actual capabilities of most children by using tests that are inherently skewed against socially sensitive children. These studies argue that children do indeed think differently than adults, but that this difference involves major factors Piaget did not take into consideration — the most commonly cited being the social factor.

Children are socially dependent on adults for information and, perhaps more importantly, for what might be called permission. Adults consistently assert their power over children, with responses such as "because I said so" being treated as legitimate logic by many parents and teachers. Children are expected to surrender their own opinions, even when correct, in deference to adult opinion. Those who refuse may be physically punished, socially humiliated, or otherwise penalized — some are even treated with psychoactive drugs, given that defiance of authority is considered a primary symptom of "oppositional disorder." Children also depend entirely on adults for food, shelter, and all the basic necessities of life. As many feminist scholars note, dependent groups tend to be discouraged from forcefully asserting their own views of the world.

Though most studies do not raise the serious question of how children are expected to surrender their opinions, they do note that the younger a child is, the more hypersensitive they are to social atmosphere and subtle adult pressure. In the most basic structure of a Piaget test, an adult asks a child an apparently straightforward question — such as "are these lines the same length?" — and then, after the child answers, makes some actually inconsequential change (such as repositioning the line or spacing the elements differently) and reiterates the question. As anyone who has been questioned by an authority figure will recognize, repetition of a question is socially understood, even by adults, to generally mean that the first answer was not good enough.

Many studies have suggested that children may be subtly attempting to placate the adult by changing their first answer, which the adult apparently found incorrect. Even adults have been shown to change their reports of known facts in response to social pressure. Solomon Asch's landmark study (1955) showed that when adult male college students were asked to judge which of four lines matched a target line — an easier task than Piaget's conservation of numbers — they made 33% wrong identifications when all their peers in the study gave the wrong answer. This social isolation made them question their own perceptions. If mild social pressure affects adult men in this way, one can certainly expect the more immediate social pressure of having an adult question a child's perception to be enough to elicit a wrong answer from a child.

Experimental Modifications That Improve Child Performance

If children are simply responding to subtle cues from the interviewer, then experimental studies should bear this out — and they do. McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974) found that when Piaget stage tasks were conducted in a way that minimized the appearance that the first answer was wrong, the success rate of an average group of four-year-old children jumped from 22.5% to 80% — a complete reversal of the trend toward failure for that age group. In this study, the researchers pretended that a "Naughty Teddy" toy had escaped from his cage and disturbed the lines of objects. The researcher then asked the child to help make sure the lines still contained the same number of objects. Not only could 80% of the children succeed at this task, they did so despite not being entirely certain that Naughty Teddy had not removed objects, added new ones, or otherwise altered the contents of the two lines.

Light et al. (1979) critiqued the Naughty Teddy design as a significant distraction from the task, and suggested that even higher numbers would have succeeded had the bear not diverted the children's attention. Light et al. (1979) also demonstrated that the classic liquid conservation study would show significantly higher rates of conservation if the researcher justified pouring liquid from one vial to another by noting that the former beaker was chipped and had to be replaced.

Judith Samuel and Peter Bryant (1984) achieved a similar result by asking only one question per task. They arranged a conservation test in which children were divided into three groups and presented with clay balls that were subsequently flattened into cylinders — a traditional Piaget task. One group received two questions in the traditional format. The second group was not asked whether the first set was equal; instead, they watched the balls being flattened and were then asked whether they were equal. The third group did not even see the two balls — only one ball and one cylinder. The first and third groups performed significantly more poorly than the second group, demonstrating that children could carry knowledge over from having seen the ball transformed, and that adult intervention altered their representation of that knowledge.