Children's performance on conservation tests as a result of age, scoring criteria, and task difficulty

摘要

The primary purposes of this investigation were to study if the arguments of some scholars (Brainerd, 1973, 1974, 1977a, 1977b; Bruner, 1966) about the validity of Piaget's findings in conservation tasks were based on scoring procedures as rigorous as Piaget's strict criteria. The sample for this study consisted of 40 children (four-to eight-year olds). The children's responses to each of the six conservation tasks (identity, number, and substance) on the entire test were assessed under three separate scoring criteria established by Piaget (as cited in Kingma, 1984) Brainerd (1973), and Bruner (1966). The results show that: (1) The children's age is the key factor in conservation reasoning. The older the children, the greater the number of correct responses. (2) The frequency of correct responses of younger children was not only affected by the level of difficulty of the tasks, but also by the scoring criteria used to assess conservation reasoning. Younger children score significantly higher in identity conservation tasks than in the more difficult equivalence conservation tasks. Younger children perform much more poorly than older children when evaluated by Piaget's scoring criteria. On the other hand, older children were less affected by the level of difficulty of the tasks and the scoring criteria. (3) The primary hypothesis is that if a child performs correctly a conservation task as judged by Piaget's rigorous scoring criteria, then that child's performance will also be scored correctly by the less rigorous criterion of Brainerd. However, the reverse is not true. The Student Program Package (Harnisch & Jenkins, 1990) allowed the researcher to observe the hypothesized pattern of children's responses across task difficulty and scoring criteria according to their developmental capability. Thirty-four of the 40 children followed the developmental approach proposed by Piaget (identity conservation, number equivalence, and substance equivalence). (4) There is inconsistency between Brainerd's (1973) scoring criterion (which use only judgment as a criterion) and Piaget's (as cited in Kingma, 1984) and Bruner's. (1966) scoring criteria (which use both judgment and logical justification).;The findings from this study suggest that the different types of scoring criteria used to assess children's performance in conservation reasoning produce results that differ from the original studies carried out by Piaget, who used the more rigorous criteria of correct choice and logical justification.