Question

Explain how a child develops understanding of conservation moving from Piaget’s Preoperational to his Concrete Operational Stage. Make sure to fully explain conservation in your answer. Also, make sure to provide an example of how the child does not understand this concept in the Preoperational Stage but does understand this concept during the Concrete Operational Stage.

Answer 1

Conservation refers to the ability to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size. is not present in children during the preoperational stage of their development at ages 2–7, but develops in the concrete operational stage at ages 7–11. Children in the preoperational stage are not able to conserve due to their incapacity to understand the transformation carried out in the tasks. Piaget also attributes this to the precedence of perception before logic. The preoperational child focuses on the initial state of the object and the finial state of the object and does not possess the operations required to reverse the transformation in order to deduce any form of conservation. However, when the child reaches the concrete operational stage of development, he/she is able to comprehend that physical quantities are unchanged, or conserved in the face of spatial or configurational transformations.