CONTINUITIES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN CONSERVATION

Abstract

An analysis of present conceptions of conservation capacity suggested that they might be unduly influenced by developmental stage theory, to the extent that continuities and individual differences at one particular stage of development are insufficiently stressed. In order to achieve a finer discrimination between individual differences in conservation of continuous quantity (solid and liquid), a new test instrument was devised. This departs from traditional experimental procedures by being presented largely in pictorial form, and by progressively increasing the number of standards, variables and distributions and redistributions of material. The results indicate that ordinal scaling of conservation at one particular developmental level is possible. It is suggested that the demonstrated individual differences may reflect differences in syllogistic reasoning and information‐processing capacity.