Conservation of Number Jean Piaget, a former psychologist, believed that the number concept is reflected through conservation. "Conservation of number tasks follow the same basic procedures of all of Piaget's conservation problems" (Bjorklund; 460). Conservation is the realization that an object remains the same no matter the changes in its form. In the experiment Piaget did, he took five black jelly beans and asked a child to take white jelly beans so that there was the same amount of black and white jelly beans. The beans are then put in two rows, black and white, but with the white jelly beans more extended. He then asked the children if the rows still had the same amount of beans. With the responses, Piaget developed three stages in relevant to the conservation of numbers. In stage 1, children are unable to consistently establish a one-to-one correspondence between two sets of items. During stage 2, children can establish an 'intuitive one-to-one correspondence' between the items in the two sets, but judgmentsOnly the stage 3 child (concrete operations) realizes that the number of beans does not change when one of the rows is elongated and that changes in spatial extension of elements are compensated for by equivalent changes in the density of the parts" (Bjorklund 460).
For my task, I did the same study on three children of different ages. I studied two boys, ages 5 and 7. The study called for the use of marbles, but due to the lack of marbles in my possession, I used m&m's, which the kids seemed to like. I also had my phone in hand to write down the kids' responses and to test their conservation. I began by placing 5 red m&m's on the table and told them to grab brown m&m's and place them on the table to be equal to the...
