Quantitative Judgments of Culturally Advantaged and Disadvantaged Preschool Children

Abstract

Four quantitative judgment tasks in which psycholinguistic and motivational variables were minimized were presented to 35 advantaged and 35 disadvantaged Ss comprising 7 age levels from 2 yr. 4 mo. through 4 yr. 7 mo. of age. Responses indicate that conservation-like cognitive operations may be affected by: (a) difficulty of the discrimination task, (b) presence of cultural disadvantages, and (c) age of advantaged is.

Nonverbal assessment of Piagetian concepts.

“…There have been 11 published follow-ups of the original Mehler and Bever study. Of these reports, 4 consist of direct or virtual replications of one or both of the Mehler and Bever tasks (Calhoun, 1971;Higgins-Trenk & Looft, 1971;Kauffman, Payne, & Ensminger, 1971;Willoughby & Trachy, 1971); 2 consist of attempts to apply a more valid assessment device to the same age range of subjects (Beilin, 1968;Siegel & Goldstein, 1969); and S include both an attempt at replication and a comparison with other means of assessment (Achenbach, 1969a;Bever et al, 1968;La Pointe & O'Donnell, 1974;Piaget, 1968;Rothenberg & Courtney, 1968). While it is always hazardous to try to summarize so many studies in a short space, the results in this case have proved quite consistent.…”