The effect of experimenter's intention on the child's understanding of conservation

Abstract

Two experiments tested McGarrigle and Donaldson's (1975) claim that the intentionality of the experimenter's action in performing the transformation in number conservation tasks misleads competent children into performance errors. In the first experiment, their naughty teddy paradigm for presenting ‘accidental’ transformations was replicated and extended by including transformations that altered number as well as ones that left number unchanged. Results with 5-year-olds showed that the naughty teddy procedure promoted inappropriate conservation with additions as well as appropriate conservation with length changes for small numbers of items (four). With larger numbers (seven) the naughty teddy effect was not apparent at all. It was concluded that the children were distracted by the teddy bear so they tended to judge the final display according to appearance-based strategies, such as counting, subitizing, and length. A new paradigm was devised to test the McGarrigle and Donaldson (1975) hypothesis more adequately. Intentionality was bypassed by giving th children explicit reason to doubt the validity of the experimenter's intention as a cue to the required answer. Conservation tasks were set in the context of a game in which the experimenter was said to be trying to trick the child. The child had to be on guard for the tricks. Results showed that, even under these conditions, 5-year-olds do confuse number with length. The results conformed closely to Siegler's (1981) characterization of conservation development in terms of movement from appearance-based strategies towards transformational strategies. It was concluded that the study of context will be best continued in relation to analyses of the knowledge and strategies children have available in a task.