Samuel and Bryant 1984

Samuel and Bryant 1984

1. To challenge Piaget's findings by altering the method used by Piaget.

   • Piaget argued that the inability to conserve is due to the child's failure to understand that things remain the same (constant) despite changes in their appearance (how they look). Piaget believes this is an example of centration. The pre-operational child has not decentred and is therefore centring on just one dimension. For example, the child is centring on just one dimension of the beaker, usually its height, and so fails to take width into account.

2. 252 boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 8.5. They were all in schools and playgroups in and around Crediton, Devon.

   • They were divided into four age groups of 63 children, whose mean ages were: 5 years 3 months, 6 years 3 months, 7 years 3 months, and 8 years 3 months. Each group was divided into 3 subgroups which underwent a different condition.
     • 1 Standard: This is the traditional two question conservation task as carried out by Piaget. The child is asked about the size of the object before and after the shape was changed.
     • 2 One judgement: This is a conservation task like the original but this time with only one question asked, the post transformation question. That is, the child is only asked once about the size of the object and this is after the transformation has taken place.
     • 3 Fixed array control: In this condition the child saw no transformation being made and only saw the post-transformation display. That is, the child just saw the objects after they had been changed and not before. The purpose of this third condition was to check that children who answered the post-transformation question correctly in the other two conditions did so by bringing over information from the pre-transformation display.

3. Three different types of material were used for the conservation tasks.

   • (a) Mass: In this task children in condition 1 and 2 were first shown two equal and identical Playdoh cylinder shapes. The transformation was to squash one of these shapes into a sausage. After this, the children were asked to compare the cylinder and the sausage. The children in condition 3 also made this comparison without seeing the first display or the transformation.
   • (b) Number: In this task children in condition 1 and 2 were shown two rows of counters of equal length arranged side by side in one to one correspondence. The rows contained six counters. Then one row was spread out or bunched up. The condition 3 children saw only the post-transformation displays.
   • (c) Volume: In this task children in conditions 1 and 2 were first shown two identical glasses with the same amounts of liquid. Then the liquid from one glass was poured into a narrower one or a shallow wider one. The condition 3 children saw only the post-transformation displays.

4. Each child was given four trials with each kind of material and the order of the tests was systematically varied between the children. Therefore there are three independent variables.

   • The three conditions, the four age groups and the three kinds of materials used.
   • The dependent variable was the number of errors made by the children.

5. The researchers recorded the number of errors children made in the tests. Examples of errors would include when a child said one lump was bigger than the other, or one row had more counters than the other, or one glass had more liquid than the other. The researchers made the following conclusions.

   • As predicted by Samuel And Bryant, children found the one judgement task significantly easier (they made less errors) than the standard conservation task and the fixed-array control. This was true of all three types of material.
   • There was a significant difference between the age groups, with older groups doing consistently better than the younger.
   • The children made fewer errors on the number task compared with the other two tasks.