What is the aim of Samuel and Bryant's study?
They aimed to show that children under the age of 7 could conserve and that it was the way the questions were asked that led to different answers in Piaglets original test.
The aimed to show that children under the age of 5 could conserve and it was the way that the experimenter dealt with the child that affected the answer.
They aimed to show that children under the age of 7 could not conserve unless questions were asked in a certain way. This was to back up Piaglets original test which showed children could not conserve.
There were 252 boys and girls in the study?
How old were the children in Samuel & Bryant's study?
2- 3 years old
4- 6.5 years
5- 8.5 years
6- 9.5 years
What was the most likely sampling technique used?
Opportunity Sampling
Random Sampling
Self-Selected Sampling
The children were dived into four groups of 63. What were they arranged by?
Intelligence
Age group
Aggression
Gender (2 groups of each)
The groups were subdivided into 3 groups of 21 participants
Where were the participants from?
Crediton in Devon UK
Leeds in the UK
Stanford in the USA
Each group of 21 participants participated in either the standard, one-judgement or fixed array condition.
What was the standard condition?
Asking the question to the child once after the transformation.
Asking the child the question before and after the transformation like Piaglet did.
It was a condition every participant did as a standard control.
What were the three in dependant variables?
Age, type of question and type of task.
Age, type of question and personality type
Personality type, type of question and type of task
The average age of 5 years and 3 months performed best?
Which experimental condition did the participants do worst in?
Standard
One-judgement
Fixed Array
Children did best in the one-judgement question.
Piaglet was right to suggest children's understanding gets takes place over time and they get better at conservation as they get older.
Mass is conserved better then number or volume.
They used counterbalancing to prevent order effects when changing the type of task (eg. Number, mass and volume) systematically.
What was the dependant variable?
Number of errors made by children in conservation tasks.
The type of task that the child did best in.
Comments made by the children when taking part.
What were the other controls?
The environment the children that the children carried out the tests in and the fact they were tested alone. In addition the researcher used the same materials for each child when carrying out the mass or volume tasks.
The children had to stay silent during the tasks until they were asked the question to keep their concentration in the task.
