SS2701 Developmental Psychology
Guideline for Group Project Presentation
Conservation tasks :
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1064124.pdf
http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0048-5705/2006/0048-57050603257B.pdf
Link to Presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dbFLupNEtLBPcfxHPa4mLi-p9YJ6-y_CmprHa4Cg5oA/edit#slide=id.p3
Presentation: 25 minutes (20 minutes group presentation and 5 minutes discussion)
Group project:
Your group will need to:
· Conduct a small-scale study on one of the topics in the list
· Observe/ test/ interview 1 subject
· Discuss theories and past research findings
· Discuss your findings
· Provide practical suggestions (e.g., to enhance positive development in the selected aspect)
· Present your group project in class
Evaluation:
v Use and explanation of method and description of findings (40%)
v Discussion of theories, research evidence and your findings (40%)
v Organization and presentation (20%)
Submit a hardcopy and a softcopy of your presentation powerpoint to your tutor before your presentation.
Our Topic: Conservation
Conservation refers to the awareness that altering an object’s or a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties. For example, pouring a glass of coke to a container which is taller and thinner does not change the volume of coke.
Testing
In this project, you will need to test a child aged from 3 to 9 years. The child may be of either sex. Also, your group will need to interview his/her mother/father to gain more information about the child’s cognitive development.
Your group will need to design one or more tasks for testing the children’s conservation (e.g., conservation of mass, weight, and number). You will need to prepare materials according to the design of your tasks, record sheets and interview questions.
Think about:
1. Based on the tasks, how would you describe the child’s conservation ability? Are the child’s responses to the tasks consistent with Piaget’s theory?
2. How do different factors (e.g., parent-child interaction and environmental factors) affect the child’s conservation ability?
Experiment result
? For each test, he did not pass the conservation requirement. He said the longer row of coins was more, even though each row had four coins (he said they’re the same but more ), he thought the ball of play dough was more than the pancake because it was taller, and he thought the cup had more water than the water bottle because the water in the cup “was taller.”
8 Coins, clay and 2 cups in diff size used for the experiment
Introduction-Heather
Lit Review- Anika
Our project/findings-Sophie
Discussion- Reid
Provide practical suggestions- Anne
Conclusion- Bill
Conservation in Psychology is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes. To be more technical, conservation is the ability to understand that redistributing material does not affect its mass, number, volume or length.
Piaget found that students below a certain level of maturity (prior to about age seven) had difficulty in comprehending certain problems involving invariants in quantity. Piaget called the stage of development just before children reach the level where they can correctly solve the conservation tasks the preoperational stage. At this stage, children seem to have difficulty focusing on more than one aspect of a situation. He called this tendency to focus on just a single aspect of a situation centration.
Reversibility is a key feature of the preoperational stage is that the child’s thinking process precludes the notion of reversibility in these mental operations: he or she cannot seem to grasp the notion that conservation requires (mentally) seeing that pouring the water back into the original container should result in the same, original quantity.
In summary, children gain the abilities of conservation (number, area, volume, orientation) and reversibility. However, although children can solve problems in a logical fashion, they are typically not able to think abstractly or hypothetically.
For example, the child’s attention may be centered primarily on the height of the water level, yet the child fails to see that the width also changes, and compensates for the lowered height.
As demonstrated by the previous literature aforementioned, demographic factors, such as location and gender, do not always have a huge impact on the development of child’s ability to conserve. This could suggest that conservation is a universal phenomenon which can be attributed to in-built cognition and not something that can be taught. This is also supported by the recent findings found of conservation within primates.
This idea of nature over nurture is supported by our experiment: despite our participant was multi-lingual, he plays musical instruments and has impressive knowledge in certain domains, yet he still didn’t have conservation.
However in other cases, many have disagreed with Piaget and argue that development of conservation can happen much sooner than Piaget suggested.
Recent research has shown that this development can be influenced, and even spurred on by the interaction and by verbal factors that are shown by the care-giver, teacher or experimenter – which leads to better comprehension and performance on the task.
So once we know that Children’ performance is affected not just the child but also the experimenter/adult. We can assume that it’s not only determined by cognitive factors, but also by language comprehension and the child’s interpretation of the intentions of the experimenter.
With this in mind, there are 2 main ways questions should be used appropriately when working the child. One way – the adult (whether teacher, parent or experimenter) should encourage and prompt conversation from the child about the properties of the materials used. These questions can be about the key characteristics of the objects. Research has shown that when the child receives more information about the objects, for example the measurements of the liquid, then the child is more likely to get the correct answer more easily than with just perceptual comparisons. As it helps the children think about the quantities in novel ways.
The second way is that the often if the experimenter or teacher asks a question twice they imply that the answer to the first question is actually incorrect. Similarly, asking the child to determine their reasoning for their answer can be intimidating. This questioning is underestimating the child’s answer. Therefore parents and teachers should avoid twice or for child’s reasoning.
The power difference between adults and children sometimes leads children to give pre-operational answers even though they are at concrete-operational stage of development. It may improve the situation if the adult could behave less authoritatively and provide a more supportive environment. This could be achieved through Vygotsky’s verbal use of scaffolding rather than by correcting the child out-right. ALSO Adults (parents especially) should recognize that it’s normal for young children to lack conservation ability, and should not assume that their child is cognitively underdeveloped simply because they fail at conservation tasks.
