| Sumario: | The current work is an exploratory study on the ideas that students in their fourth semester of engineering have about "conservation". We review the Piagetian position on the importance of conservations in logical operational structures in child development and we comment upon other current trends in cognitive psychology. We discuss briefly the development of conservations in science during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and we point out the contrast between this and how most textbooks introduce this subject. We have also carried out a first, tentative analysis of the answers given by a sample of these students to a brief questionnaire about "conservation" and "non-conservation". © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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