Abstract:
The purposes of this research was to study the effects of social interaction on conservation concepts of mass, liquid quantity and area of five to six years old children. Ninety students from Mahasarakam Kindergarten, between the ages of 5.5 and 6.5, with an average age of 5 years 9 months, participated in the experiment. There were 3 sessions in this research. Session 1 pretest. The subjects were individually tested on three-conservation tests ; mass, liquid quantity quantity and area. The subjects were then, classified into two groups : Thirty conservers and sixty nonconservers. The nonconservers were devided into experimental group and control group, each group consisted of 30 subjects. Session 2 Social interaction sequence. In this session, thirty pairs of subjects, each containing a nonconserver and a conserver, were asked to settle on a single answer between them for each problem. The conservation problem in this session were parallel to the problems in the pretest, but different conservation stimulis or different conservation transformations were used. The control group was given no social interaction experience. Session 3 Posttest. Approximately 7 days after the social interaction session, each subject was individually posttested on the pretest problems. The control group was posttested in the same manner as the subjects in the social interaction session. The statistical methods used for data analysis were the one way ANOVA with repeated measures and the t-test. The results of this research were that the experimental group who was given the social interaction experience significantly performed better in the conservation tests, but the performance on all three conservation tests : mass, liquid quantity and area, were not significantly different. The conservers in the pretest did not significantly lose conservation and the control group did not make progress in conservation.