Criticism
The Conservation Task (and hence Piaget's theory) has been criticized on a number of fronts: that answers reflect the children's cultural expectations and the context of interchanges with adults, and children's understanding of the word "more".
The ages at which children are able to complete conservation tasks has been questioned by subsequent research. Research has suggested that asking the same question twice leads young children to change their answer as they assume that they are being asked again because they got it wrong first time around. The importance of context was also emphasised by researchers who altered the task so that a 'naughty teddy' changed the array rather than an experimenter themselves. This seemed to give children a clear reason for the second question being asked, and 4 year old children were able to demonstrate knowledge of the conservation of matter, much earlier than Piaget's reported 7-11 year old threshold for Concrete Operations. (See Bower, 1974, Object Permanence.)
Cross-cultural differences found in the Conservation Task, (and in Formal Operational tasks, among others) led Piaget (1972) to revise his claim of universal stages, allowing for contextual variability, depending on experience in particular domains.
For example: North African Wolof adolescents tested by Greenfield (1966) responded that the quantity of water in a conservation test had changed. However Irvine (1978) suggests that their interpretation of the experimenter’s purpose may have conflicted with giving straightforward answers to the standard Piagetian questions because - except in school interrogation - Wolof people seldom ask questions to which they already know the answers. Irvine states: “Where this kind of questioning does occur it suggests an aggressive challenge, or a riddle with a trick answer” (1978, p. 549). When Irvine presented the task as language-learning questions about the meaning of quantity terms such as "more" and "the same", the responses reflected understanding of conservation. (from Rogoff 2003, p. 247-248)
Read more about this topic: Conservation (psychology)
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