Conservation of Mass,Weight, and Volume as Evidenced by Adolescent Girls in Eighth Grade

Summary

This investigation is a replication of part of a study by Elkind on quantity conceptions in adolescence. A home economics class composed of 28 eighth-grade girls in a junior high school in Levittown, New York, were tested with Piagetian tasks to determine their conceptions of mass, weight, and volume. The results are strikingly parallel to those obtained by Elkind for the same mean age group. In both studies, only 29% of the subjects of mean age 13.6 had attained the conception of conservation of volume, a finding at variance with Piaget's earlier results.