Fourty-two 2nd-grader children were given individually 7 tasks concerning the conservation of area. Fifteen of them showed less than 2 (included) correct responses and only these Ss received a training; the central part of its curriculum was Smedslund's “practice in conflict situations without external reinforcement”, which required S to compare the areas of two figures one of which was deformed and to add a piece to the ‘perceptually’ smaller one or to subtract it from the larger. This practice was expected to induce cognitive conflict between perceptual and addition subtraction (A-S) cues; the reduction of conflict would lead S to the state of complete disregard of the irrelevant perceptual cues (i.e. conservation).In the course of training, however, some Ss did not respond correctly to conflict situations unless a number of pieces were added or taken away, because the A-S cue was so easily dominated by the perceptual one that little conceptual conflict was aroused. This was the more often case when a child judged the area of a figure only by its vertical or horizontal length. In other words, he could not differentiate area from other geometrical properties. Then, an auxiliary learning step was inserted in order to give S practices of comparing the areas of two figures by direct superposition or in terms of the number of unit figures. In these practices any error a child committed was corrected. After S was sure to make correct responses in the auxiliary step, he was again put to conflict situations.Thus 6 out of 15 Ss changed their mode of response from nonconservation at the beginning of the training to the state of conservation. Five of them were able to apply the principle of conservation, acquired through experience with transformations of area with a discernible unit measure, to irregular sub-division and, with some suggestions to displaced area as well. These Ss showed a marked progress in a posttest administered a week later, although only one of them conserved area for all the tasks.Five out of the remaining 9 Ss were considered to belong to the intermediary stage of area conservation at the pretest and they responded correctly to nearly all the questions in the training session, although 2 of them occasionally made an incorrect response or could not say an adequate reason. This might be due to the fact that i) while, in the pretest, itemss were arranged from the more difficult to easier, items in the training session were arranged in a reversed order; ii) the child at the intermediary stage would experience conceptual conflict in the pretest: itself. Thus “equilibration” was initiated for them during the test session. Four of them were the conservers to all of the questions at the posttest.Still other 4 children responded to each question correctly in the training, although they had shown no conservation response in the pretest. Two of them, however, turned back to the nonconservation stage in the posttest. The reason for their response fluctuation was difficult to find.
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Jun 1, 1966
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Open Access