Accelerated conservation acquisition and IQ gains by blind children.

Because blind chidlren are retarded in the attainment of substance conservation and other Piagetial concepts, it was hypothesized that a learning set training procedure which incorporated both substance conservation and subordinate concepts might accelerate the acquisition of substance conservation itself and promote generalization to weight conservation scores and IQ. To test the hypotheses, 28 blind children aged 8 to 13 (IQ range 62 to 131) were divided into two groups. Their visual capacities ranged from 20/500 in the best eye to total congenital blindness and etiologies were varied, but consisted primarily of cataracts and glaucoma. All children were pretested and posttested on Slosson's Intelligence Test, 40 substance conservation tasks, and 20 weight conservation tasks, which involved both continuous and discontinuous substance and included almost all those found in the literature prior to 1970. A lengthy learning set procedure employing everyday household objects was then used to teach the experimental children conceptual skills that are prerequisites to substance conservation. Finally the learning set procedure was used to teach the concept of substance conservation itself to the children. The trained group exhibited significantly increased substance and weight conservation scores and IQs (all ps less than .005). The control group, which had spent matched periods of time in intellectual enrichment activities failed to improve significantly on any of the dependent variables. The research suggests that acceleration of the development of Piagetian concepts may be profitable enterprise in the case of blind children.