Acquisition of conservation through social interaction.

In two experiments, groups of three children (generally one nonconserver and two conservers) were required to respond with one group answer to a series of standardized conservation problems. When tested again individually, all subjects made significant gains in conservation judgments and explanations on the same problems, on a parallel form of those problems, and on new problems. Nonconservers made the greatest gains. In all, 108 children with mean age of 6.7 years were studied. That so many reasonable attempts to train nonconservers in conservation have been surprising failures raises the question of how children normally acquire conserved concepts. In the Language and Thought oj the Child, Piaget suggested originally that a necessary condition for the movement from the stage of preoperational or egocentric thought to more mature stages of thought was the occurrence of repeated communication conflicts between children. These conflicts would require the young child to attend to another child's point of view and perspective, and the ability to maintain a perspective of another or to take another's role appears to be related to operational modes of