Interestingly, research shows that children who practice conservation do tend to learn it more quickly, and children who conserve perform better at certain mathematical tasks. There are seven Piagetian tasks, generally tend to be acquired in this order: number (usually acquired by age 6), length, liquid, mass, area, weight, and volume (usually acquired by age 10). In short, being able to conserve means knowing that a quantity doesn’t change if it’s been altered (by being stretched, cut, elongated, spread out, shrunk, poured, etc). Depending on where the children are developmentally (and their personalities), the one with the whole cookie may point out that the other child has “more.” Children at this age are learning how to “conserve,” and may truly believe that the child with two cookie pieces has more-even when the two cookies are halves of the same whole.Ĭonservation, in child development, is a logical thinking ability first studied by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. One child’s cookie has been cut in half, while the other’s is whole. Picture two 4-year-olds, both with a cookie of the same size.