Twenty first-graders observed an adult model perform a quantity conservation task. The children were then tested on a series of generalization tasks immediately, after one week, and after three months. The results suggested that the social experience of observation appeared to activate a cognitive restructuring of the children's mental operations.…

The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate whether the effect of observing a peer who was conserving could facilitate subsequent acquisition and transfer of conservation ability in a nonconserving child. Eighty-two nonconserving first grade children acquired the ability to give conservation judgments and reasons on six conservation…

The effects of modeling and corrective feedback on the conservation of equalities and inequalities were studied with items spanning three stimulus dimensions (length, number, and two-dimensional space). Observation of a model, correction training (joining positive feedback with verbal rule provision), and the combination of observation and…

Appraises the respective contribution of initial competence and of imitation of modeled response in the observational learning of conservation among first grade children. (HOD)

A study was conducted to investigate the respective contributions of personal and social factors (initial competence and imitation of modeled responses) in children's observational learning of conservation. Subjects included 180 first-grade nonconservers from six schools attended by French-speaking middle class pupils. All subjects failed…