The influence of jean piglet’s conservation tasks on the academic performance of pupils in the concrete operational stage of Kitwe District

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to assess the accomplishment of Piagetian conservation tasks on primary school children who are in the concrete operational stage in Kitwe district on the Copperbelt province. The study also sought to establish if there was a relationship between conservation tasks and academic performance. A quasi-experimental design was adopted as a research design for the study and the sample consisted of 150 pupils from public primary schools who were between the ages of 7 and 11 years and were in grades 1 to 5. Data was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) to generate descriptive statistics, frequency distributions, T-tests correlation tests and hierarchical regression was conducted to test the major hypotheses. The findings indicated that 68% of children in the concrete operational stage had at least accomplished Piagetian conservation tasks. The study further indicated that there was no difference on the performance of Piagetian tasks between boys and girls as levenes test for equality of variances showed a 0.639 which is more than 0.05 level of significance. The results also showed that age was positively correlated to Piagetian tasks meaning that an increase in age increased the performance in Piagetian tasks. On the performance of number conservation there was no significant difference between boys and girls as the P value was 0.398. Lastly, on whether there was a correlation between success on Piagetian tasks and academic achievement, the results indicated that there was a negative correlation between mathematics and conservation of liquid (r= -0.219). However, there was a positive correlation between mathematics and science (r= 0.530). Overall, the results indicated that there was no relationship between success on Piagetian tasks and academic achievement. It was recommended that pupils in the concrete operational stage should focus on hands on activities which can help them discover concepts and principles that they can accommodate on their own.