| Abstract: | This study was designed to investigate the reported capacity of some non-conservers of weight to deal successfully with tasks involving multiple classification. Tests of seriation, class inclusion, conservation of quantity, weight and volume, and eight multiple classification tasks (after Inhelder and Piaget) were given to 49 recently immigrated Yugoslav children (median age 10.5 years) in Australian primary schools, using Serbo-Croat as the language of administration. Performance on most of these tests of concrete operational behaviour was found to be about two years retarded as compared with Genevan data. On seven of the eight multiple classification tasks, not less than one-third of non-conservers of weight were able to give operational solutions. No differences were found in this group of 22 non-conservers, in terms of success vs. non-success in multiple classification, in age, sex, urban/rural domicile of origin, more/less recent arrival in Australia, or Macedonian/Serbian ethnicity. It is concluded that a case can be made for not regarding the concrete operations stage as a formal unity, but instead (following Flavell and Wohlwill) as a set of structures without necessary interdependence. |
