Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney) / quote 53 of 70
Conservation of number and the spread-out coins
Because preoperational children tend to believe what they see, they do not yet have a firm grasp of qualities belonging to the objects in their world. For example, they confuse “heavy” with “large.” Due to inexperience, most young children would initially be surprised that a beach ball is lighter than a baseball. Unable to separate height from age, preoperational children will insist that the tallest person is the oldest. Piaget did a classic experiment involving a conservation task to demonstrate this kind of thinking in children. He put two sets of coins on a table in two lines. Both sets had the same small number of coins, but the coins in one line were spread farther apart. When asked which line had more coins in it, preoperational children always said the line in which the coins were spread farther apart had more. They held to this belief even when the coins from the two lines were matched up to show that for each coin from the long line, there was a coin from the short line. Conservation tasks such as this one involving conservation of number show whether a child has grasped the concept that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even though their outward appearance changes. Because children at this stage are dependent on their own experience, they tend to make incorrect generalizations. They base their general belief about something on a single experience, which may cause a false conclusion. One example is the girl above who believed that a dog’s barking made birds fly because she had seen birds flying when a dog barked.