Piaget's Logic Test

Subjects
Names	Ami	Samantha	Charity	Emily	Ashley	Olivia	Bridgett
Age	13	13	11	10	6	6	4

The story of the Lion and the Mouse was read to the seven participants. When asked, "what do you think this story means?", they responded with the following: Ami and Emily both responded in the same way. They felt the story said, " no matter what s ize you are you can help someone." We felt these children were using thinking from the concrete operational stage. The mouse helping the lion is where they came up with the size analogy, which goes with the literal content of the story. Charity said sh e felt the story was saying for everyone to help someone in need. This response seemed to border on concrete operational and formal operation. The moral of Helping someone in need is a main moral being shown in the story. This shows signs of using form al operational thinking, but we feel this could also be read pretty easily from the content of the story. Samantha came up with, "a friend in need is a friend indeed". We decided this was a little to perfect of a description of the moral (almost as tho ugh she was reading it strait from the book). This thinking would be in the formal operational stage, but we feel she was probably referring to past experience with this response and not using deep intellectual thinking processes. Ashley responded with an almost play by play of the entire story. This was probably a use of both preoperational and concrete operational stages. She seemed to understand the story as more than just a story, but she didn't seem to want to come up with any justification for h er feelings of what the story actually said. Bridgett and Olivia both use thinking skills that were without a doubt from the preoperational stage. They simply said, "It's a good story". I guess they felt that said it all.

Classification

For the classification part of this experiment, the results were as follows.

A=notebook B=picture from magazine C=straight pin D=paper sack E=pencil F=marker G=thumb tack H=tape I=chalk

Classification Results
Names Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5

Samantha ABD H GC EFI N/A

Ami ABD EFI CGH N/A N/A

Charity ABDE FG C H I

Emily ABD H GC EFI N/A

Samantha had group one as the paper products group, group two as the tape group, group three as the things that stick group, and group four as the things that write group. These groupings suggest that Samantha is in the concrete operational stage. The only item that seem to throw her off was the tape. She didn't put together that it could go in with the tack and straight pin. Ami came up with the same first group. Her second group also match with group four from Samantha's list. Ami did, howeve r, put the tape in with the pin and tack. This suggest that she was grouping them with their function. We decided that she is also in the concrete operational stage. Charity had the most deviance compared to the others. She put the pencil into the fir st group. This seemed to be pretty advanced reasoning. Instead of just being paper products, she took the origin of the products one further and called them wood products. Her second group had the marker with the thumb tack. This group was the plastic group. Group 3 was the metals, and group 4 was the tape. Charity also separated the chalk into its own substance group. We thought this was pretty creative thinking and is definitely concrete operational. Emily also used concrete operational thinking and had the same groupings as Samantha.

Classification Results
Names	Group 1	Group 2	Group 3	Group 4	Group 5
Samantha	ABD	H	GC	EFI	N/A
Ami	ABD	EFI	CGH	N/A	N/A
Charity	ABDE	FG	C	H	I
Emily	ABD	H	GC	EFI	N/A

Conservation

The conservation section of this study went as follows: We did the squashed clay example, as well as, the water experiment for conservation. The different ways of presenting this experiment didn't seem to make any difference with who was able to tell whether the quantities changed or not. Ami, Emily, and Cha rity all answered by saying the quantities were equal. Ashley, Bridgett, and Olivia all felt the squashed clay had more in it than the ball. These three also thought the tall skinny cup of water had more than the short fat cup. These results were fairl y predictable considering the ages of these children.

Combinatorial Logic

This part of the study was conducted with blocks which were numbered 1-5. The results were as follows: We lost some of our subjects for this section. Ashley started out picking 3,4,5, then 2,5,4, and 5,2,4,. She then lost interest and decided it was time to conclude her participation in the rest of the study. At first it looked like she was forming some kind of system, but the following groups seemed random. Her attention span showed that she is not in either the concrete nor formal operational stages but is still in the preoperational stage. The other subject we still had was Emily. Emily started with 1,2,3 then 1,3,2 then 3,2,1, and so on until she had all 60 possible combinations recorded. I deduct that this child is the next Einstein. M ary, being the humble Mom, was proud but didn't seem overly amazed at this accomplishment.

This study did show two things very clearly. First, that children do seem to advance through Piaget's stages as they get older. Second, they all advance through the stages at different rates. We did decided that in some areas the children seemed t o be stuck, or at least positioned, between stages. We concluded that they do not jump from one stage to the next; Instead, they are gradually crawling over a fence which separates the two stages. At times they are straddling this fence, hanging over on each side before actually falling into the next stage.

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