Philippine Normal University

Taft Ave., Manila

College of Education
Department of Early Childhood Education

Group IV Members:
Castillo, Patricia A.
De Jesus, Joanna May D.
Emnace, Rubelyn P.
Gumapos, Marilou
Malana, Davie Luh Marie M.
Sison, Amapola T.
Viado, Danesa C.
IV – 3 BECEd

I. Objectives

1. Identify the cognitive developmental stages of Piaget.

2. Identify the different conservation tasks developed by Piaget.
3.

II. Subject Matter

“Piaget’s Conservation Tasks”

References:
Lectures
• http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/DLiT/2000/Piaget/tests.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/conservation_%28psychology%29
• http://www.telacommunications.com/nutshell/stages.htm
• Wadsworth, Barry J. Piaget’sTheory of Cognitive and Affective Development:
3rd Edition. 1971.
• Turner, Jeffrey S. Lifespan Development: 5th Edition. Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston, Inc. 1995.
• Jersild, Arthur T. Child Psychology
• Yussen, Steven R. Child Development: An Introduction. 1978.
• Watson, Robert I. Psychology of the Child
• Readings in Human Development: Annual Editions. the Dushkin Publishing
Group, Inc. Sluice Dock Guilford, Ct. 06437.1976.
Videos
• Liquid Amount, Number, Substance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=YtLEWVu815o
• Number: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=19qM4OoV59U&feature=PlayList&p=541BF29A35EC6747&playnext=1&pl
aynext_from=PL&index=27
• Liquid Amount: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BERoMqsOIIY
• Weight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChWBPYpV-
pQ&feature=channel_page

III. Materials:
 Cartolina, Manila Paper, Costumes, Pentel Pen, Scotch Tape, Coloring
Materials, Laptop, Speaker

IV. Procedure
Preliminary Activities
Motivation:
The class will be divided into two. The group reporters will give a topic and
each group should write as many words as they can about the topic on the board.
The winning group will be the group with most words.

Presentation:

Jean Piaget, a developmental biologist who devoted his life to closely

observing and recording the intellectual abilities of infants, children and
adolescents, concluded that human development involves a series of stages. These
stages are known as the Sensory-Motor Stage, Pre-Operational Stage, Concrete
Operations Stage, and the Formal Operations Stage. During each of these stages
new abilities are gained and thus prepare the child for the succeeding levels.

1. Sensory-Motor Stage

This is the first stage in the development of intelligence (usually 0-2 years of
age) and is concerned with the evolution of those abilities necessary to construct
and reconstruct objects. During this period, infants are busy discovering
relationships between their bodies and the environment. Researchers have
discovered that infants have relatively well developed sensory abilities. The child
relies on seeing, touching, sucking, feeling, and using their senses to learn things
about themselves and the environment. Piaget calls this the sensory-motor stage
because the early manifestations of intelligence appear from sensory perceptions
and motor activities.

Countless informal experiments during the sensory-motor stage led to one of

the important achievements. They enable the infant to develop the concept of
separate selves, that is, the infant realizes that the external world is not an
extension of themselves. The sensory-motor stage is also marked by the child's
increasing ability to coordinate separate activities. An example of the fundamental
importance of this is coordination between looking and reaching, without this an
action as simple as picking up an object is not possible.

Infants realize that an object can be moved by a hand (concept of causality),

and develop notions of displacement and events. An important discovery during the
latter part of the sensory-motor stage is the concept of "object permanence".

Object permanence is the awareness that an object continues to exist even

when it is not in view. In young infants, when a toy is covered by a piece of paper,
the infant immediately stops and appears to lose interest in the toy. This child has
not yet mastered the concept of object permanence. In older infants, when a toy is
covered the child will actively search for the object, realizing that the object
continues to exist.
 After a child has mastered the concept of object permanence, the emergence
of “directed groping", begins to take place. With directed groping, the child
begins to perform motor experiments in order to see what will happen. During
directed groping, a child will vary his movements to observe how the results will
differ. The child learns to use new means to achieve an end. The child discovers he
can pull objects toward himself with the aid of a stick or string, or tilt objects to get
them through the bars of his playpen. The child begins to recognize cause-and-
effect relationships at this stage, allowing the development of intentionally. Once a
child knows what the effects of his activities will be, he can intend these effects.

2. Pre-Operational Stage

This stage (usually 2-7 years old), bears witness to the elaboration of the
symbolic function, those abilities which have to do with representing things.
According to Lefrancois, 1995, a child will react to all similar objects as though they
are identical. At this time all women are 'Mummy' and all men 'Daddy'. While at this
level a child's thought is transductive, which means the child will make inferences
from one specific to another (Carlson & Buskist, 1997). This leads to a child looking
at the moon and reasoning; 'My ball is round, that thing there is round; therefore
that thing is a ball'.

From the age of about 4 years until 7 most children go through the Intuitive
period. This is characterized by egocentric, perception-dominated and intuitive
thought which is prone to errors in classification (Lefrancois, 1995).

Most preoperational thinking is self-centered, or egocentric. According to

Piaget, a preoperational child has difficulty understanding life from any other
perspective than his own. In this time, the child is very me, myself, and I oriented.

Egocentrism is very apparent in the relationship between two preschool

children. Imagine two children are playing right next to each other, one playing with
a coloring book and the other with a doll. They are talking to each other in
sequence, but each child is completely oblivious to what the other is saying.
Julie: "I love my dolly, her name is Tina"
Carol: "I'm going to color the sun yellow"
Julie: "She has long, curly hair like my auntie"
Carol: "Maybe I'll color the trees yellow, too"
Julie: "I wonder what Tina's eyes are made of?"
Carol: "I lost my orange crayon"
Julie: "I know her eyes are made of glass."

These types of exchanges are called "collective monologues". This type of

monologue demonstrates the "egocentrism" of children's thinking in this stage.

According to Piaget, egocentrism of the young child leads them to believe

that everyone thinks as they do, and that the whole world shares their feelings and
desires. This sense of oneness with the world leads to the child's assumptions of
magic omnipotence. Not only is the world created for them, they can control it. This
leads to the child believing that nature is alive, and controllable. This is a concept of
egocentrism known as "animism", the most characteristic of egocentric thought.
 Closely related to animism is artificialism, or the idea that natural
phenomena are created by human beings, such as the sun is created by a man with
a match. "Realism" is the child's notion that their own perspective is objective and
absolute. The child thinks from one perspective and regards this reality as absolute.
Names, for example, are real to the child. The child can't realize that names are
only verbal labels, or conceive the idea that they could have been given a different
name.

During the pre-operational period, the child begins to develop the use of
symbols (but cannot manipulate them), and the child is able to use language and
words to represent things not visible. Also, the pre-operational child begins to
master conservation problems.

By the age of four children are developing a more complete understanding of

concepts and tend to have stopped reasoning tranductively (Lefrancois, 1995).
However their thought is dominated more by perception than logic. This is clearly
illustrated by conservation experiments. Although the child is still unable to think in
a truly logical fashion, they may begin to treat objects as part of a group. The pre-
operational child may have difficulty with classification. This is because, to a pre-
operational child, the division of a parent class into subclasses destroys the parent
group (Lefrancois, 1995).

Conservation is the conceptualization that the amount or quantity of a

matter stays the same regardless of any changes in an irrelevant dimension. It is
also something that had created considerable confusion during earlier stages, and
which means the amount or quantity of matter remains the same, despite changes
made in its outward appearance. Thus, even though the distribution of matter
changes nonetheless conserves its properties. The development from non-
conservation to conservation is a gradual one. As with all other changes in cognitive
structures (schemata), the change is largely a function of the actions (cognitive and
sensory-motor) of the child. According to Piaget, conservation structures cannot be
induced through direct instruction (teaching) or reinforcement techniques. Active
experience is the key.

The following are the different Conservation Problems or Tasks developed by

Jean Piaget and his co-workers to assess children’s levels of conceptual
development and their level of attainment with respect to the concepts involve.

a. Conservation of Number
Number is not changed despite the rearrangement of objects.
b. Conservation of Length
The length of a string is unaffected by its shape or its displacement.
c. Conservation of Liquid Amount
The amount of liquid is not changed by the shape of its container.
d. Conservation of Substance (Solid Amount)
The amount of substance does not change by changing its shape or by
subdividing it.
e. Conservation of Area
 The area covered by a given number of two-dimensional objects is unaffected
by their arrangements.
f. Conservation of Weight
A clay balls weighs the same even when its shape is elongated or flattened.
g. Conservation of Displacement
The volume of water that is displaced by an object depends on the volume of
the object and is independent of weight, shape, or position of the immersed
object.

In the latter part of the preoperational period, the child begins to have an
understanding between reality and fantasy.

3. Concrete Operations Stage

During this stage (usually 7-11 years old) the child acquires internalized
actions that permit the child to do “in his head” what before he would have had to
accomplish through real actions. Children begin to reason logically, and organize
thoughts coherently. However, they can only think about actual physical objects,
and cannot handle abstract reasoning. They have difficulty understanding abstract
or hypothetical concepts. This stage is also characterized by a loss of egocentric
thinking.

During this stage, the child has the ability to master most types of
conservation experiments, and begins to understand reversibility. Conservation is
the realization that quantity or amount does not change when nothing has been
added or taken away from an object or a collection of objects, despite changes in
form or spatial arrangement. The concrete operational stage is also characterized
by the child’s ability to coordinate two dimensions of an object simultaneously,
arrange structures in sequence, and transpose differences between items in a
series. The child is capable of concrete problem-solving. Categorical labels such as
"number" or "animal" are now available to the child.

Logic
Piaget determined that children in the concrete operational stage were fairly
good at the use of inductive logic. Inductive logic involves going from a specific
experience to a general principle. On the other hand, children at this age have
difficulty using deductive logic, which involves using a general principle to
determine the outcome of a specific event.

Reversibility
One of the most important developments in this stage is an understanding of
reversibility, or awareness that actions can be reversed. An example of this is being
able to reverse the order of relationships between mental categories. For example,
a child might be able to recognize that his or her dog is a Labrador, that a Labrador
is a dog, and that a dog is an animal.

A large portion of the defining characteristics of the stage can be understood

in terms of the child overcoming the limits of stage two, known as the pre-
operational stage. The pre-operational child has a number of cognitive barriers
which are subsequently broken down, and it is important to note that overcoming
these obstacles is not due to gradual improvement in abilities the child already
possesses. Rather the changes are genuine qualitative shifts, corresponding to new
abilities being acquired.

The first, and most discussed, of these limitations is egocentrism. The pre-
operational child has a “'self-centered' view of the world” (Smith, Cowie and Blades,
2003, p. 399), meaning that she has difficulty understanding that other people may
see things differently, and hence hold a differing point of view. Piaget's classic test
for egocentrism is the three mountains task (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956), which
concrete operational thinkers can complete successfully.

A second limitation, which is overcome in the concrete operational stage, is

the perceptual domination of one aspect of a situation. Before the stage begins, the
child's perception of any situation or problem will be dominated by one aspect; this
is best illustrated by the failure of pre-operational children to pass Piaget's
conservation tasks (Piaget and Inhelder, 1974).

Perhaps the most important limitation, yet the most difficult to describe and
measure, is that of the turn to logical operators. A pre-operational child will use
mostly simple, heuristic strategies in problem solving. Once a child reaches the
concrete operational stage, they will be in possession of a completely new set of
strategies, allowing problem solving using logical rules. This new ability manifests
itself most clearly in children's justifications for their answers. Concrete operational
thinkers will explicitly state their use of logical rules in problem solving (Harris and
Butterworth, 2002). This area also indicates the way in which the concrete
operational stage can be negatively defined; although children can now use logical
strategies, these can only be applied to concrete, immediately present objects.
Thinking has become logical, but is not yet abstract.

These shifts in the child's thinking lead to a number of new abilities which are
also major, positively defined characteristics of the concrete operational stage. The
most frequently cited ability is conservation. Now that children are no longer
perceptually dominated by one aspect of a situation, they can track changes much
more easily and recognize that some properties of an object will persevere through
change. Conservation is always gained in the same order, firstly with respect to
number, followed secondly by weight, and thirdly by volume.

A second new ability gained in the concrete operational stage is reversibility.

This refers to the ability to mentally trace backwards, and is of enormous help to
the child in both their problem solving and the knowledge they have of their own
problem solving. For the former this is because they can see that in a conservation
task, for example, the change made could be reversed to regain the original
properties. With respect to knowledge of their own problem solving, they become
able to retrace their mental steps, allowing an entirely new level of reflection.

Concrete operational children also gain the ability to structure objects

hierarchically, known as classification. This includes the notion of class inclusion,
e.g. understanding an object being part of a subset included within a parent set,
and is shown on Piaget's inclusion task, asking children to identify, out of a number
of brown and white wooden beads, whether there were more brown beads or
wooden beads (Piaget, 1965).

Seriation is another new ability gained during this stage, and refers to the
child's ability to order objects with respect to a common property. A simple example
of this would be placing a number of sticks in order of height. An important new
ability which develops from the interplay of both seriation and classification is that
of numeration. Whilst pre-operational children are obviously capable of counting, it
is only during the concrete operational stage that they become able to apply
mathematical operators, thanks to their abilities to order things in terms of number
(seriation) and to split numbers into sets and subsets (classification), enabling more
complex multiplication, division and so on.

Finally, and also following the development of seriation, is transitive

inference. This is the name given to children's ability to compare two objects via an
intermediate object. So for instance, one stick could be deemed to be longer than
another by both being individually compared to another (third) stick.

4. Formal Operations Stage

The last stage (usually 12-15 years of age and continues throughout
adulthood), characterized by the ability to formulate hypotheses and systematically
test them to arrive at an answer to a problem, the individual in this stage is also
able to think abstractly and to understand the form or structure of a mathematical
problem.

Another characteristic of the individual is their ability to reason contrary to

fact. That is, if they are given a statement and asked to use it as the basis of an
argument they are capable of accomplishing the task. For example, they can deal
with the statement "what would happen if snow were black".

IV. Application
The four groups will be retained for this activity. There will be 4 manila
papers to be posted on the walls of the room. This will be their posts as they draw
and paint the topic they will pick from the presenters. Each group will be provided
art materials. Each group will be given 15 minutes to finish the task. After that, they
will discuss and explain the meaning of their artwork which depicts the lesson for
that day.

OR
Each group will have to pick from the presenters a topic (about conservation
tasks) and think of another example for that task which they will have to write on
manila paper provided for them. Each group will be given 15 minutes to do their
task and afterwards, their work will be evaluated by the presenters if it is
appropriate to the conservation task that they had picked.