A test of milieu effects with some of Piaget's tasks.

Approximately 500 European and Chinese boys between the ages of 10 and 13 were given four Piaget tasks (combinatorial reasoning, conservation of space, weight and volume), and Raven's Progressive Matrices (generally regarded as an intelligence test). Among the Chinese boys education varied from little or none to full schooling. Similarities across milieus were more striking than differences: there was an odd lack of relationship between the combinatorial task (closely tied to Matrices performance) and the conservation tasks (no such tie); replication of Geneva results was fair to good; the differences occurring suggest a need for a closer look at the concept 'stability of reasoning' and at the expected inter-relationships among various tasks.