GROUP ASSESSMENT OF COGNITIVE LEVEL BY PICTORIAL PIAGETIAN TASKS

Abstract

Several recent studies indicate that Piagetian tasks provide both teachers and clinicians with important information about children's cognitive level that is not provided by traditional measures of intelligence (e.g., Freyberg, 1966; Hathaway & HathawayTheunisseu, 1974; Kaufman & Kaufman, 1972). Yet, in most contemporary educational situations, there are just not enough personnel and time for the administration of Piagetian tasks via the method. (See Meyer, 1972, for a summary of standardized individually administered Piagetian tasks.) The obvious solution is to change the stimulus mode of presentation and replace individual testing with group testing. The critical question is whether this can be done without losing the benefit of the Piagetian clinical approach. Printed and verbal tests of Piagetian tasks have met with some limited success in older children (e.g., Gray, 1973; Lawson, 1976; Tisher, 1971). But this method presents problems with younger children, especially those with reading and/or language difficulties. Inhelder and Piaget (1958) note that the change from a physical mode of presentation to a verbal mode may change the age of acquisition by several years, and in some cases (e.g., transitivity) may even change the task from the level of concrete operations to the level of formal operations. Another approach is to use pictorial material in the administration of the Piagetian tasks. This approach has met with success (e.g., Murray, 1970; Winkelmann, 1974) over the limited number of tasks and populations upon which it has been tried. However, whether this approach can be widely used in schools and clinics rests upon whether it is as successful with children from nonstandard backgrounds, and over a wider range of Piagetian concepts. This is especially important in light of the findings indicating that children from a low SES background may have problems with pictorial materials (Siegel, 1971). The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which a pictorial mode of presenting Piagetian tasks would yield results compatible with the Clinical-Genevan approach, particularly with children from nonstandard backgrounds. The data presented in this study consist of the pooled data from several studies not widely available (DeAvila, 1973; DeAvila & Havassy, 1974a, 1975; DeAvila & Phyphers, 1968; DeAvila, Struthers & Randall, 1969; Struthers & DeAvila, 1967; Ulibarri, 1974).