Early Childhood and Conservation of Properties

Paper Summary:

This paper shows that an important concept in children's development of cognitive skills is the concept of conservation of properties. As was pointed out by Jean Piaget, a very significant feature of pre-operational thought is that it tends to center attention on one noticeable or striking feature of an object, while ignoring or neglecting other aspects, resulting in a distortion of the reasoning process.

From the Paper:

"An important concept in children's development of cognitive skills is the concept of conservation of properties. As was pointed out by Jean Piaget, a very significant feature of pre-operational thought is that it tends to center attention on one noticeable or striking feature of an object, while ignoring or neglecting other aspects, resulting in a distortion of the reasoning process. An older person is able to decenter, i.e. to take into account aspects of the object that compensate for the biasing effects of the one thing that is more prominent (Flavell, 1963). This has been clearly demonstrated in the so-called conservation studies (Lovell & Ogilvie, 1960; Rao, 1976; Ayers et al., 1974)."

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