Efeitos do ensino de contagem sobre a aquisição de comportamento conceitual numérico em crianças pré-escolares

Abstract

Abstract Although the studies regarding the role of counting in the acquisition of the numeric conceptual behavior has grown and developed in the past few decades, results available in the literature still show experimental and theoretical disagreements. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of training on oral counting in the acquisition of numeric conceptual behavior through the comparison to the performance of children who were not exposed to the training on counting. Participants consisted of eight children, between three and four years old, from a private elementary school in Araraquara city, Sao Paulo, Brazil. The battery of numeric tasks used for this purpose consisted of the following stimuli, all them ranging from 1 to 9: arabic digits (A); sets of pictures of objects and animals with a random spatial distribution (B); printed number-words (C), spoken numbers (D) and naming (E). Participants in both groups were submitted to the following initial tests: oral counting, identity matching (AA, BB, CC), symbolic relations (AB, AC, BA, CA, BC, CB), auditive-visual matching (DA, DB, DC) and naming (EA, EB, EC). Equivalence relations between numbers and quantities (AB, AC and DA) were trained on both groups, experimental (EG) and control (CG), and oral counting was taught to the EG only. Training on counting consisted of the following steps: verification, training and production of the numeric verbal sequence repertoire, and establishment of oneto- one correspondence between numbers and names of elements in a set. The emergence of the BA, BC, CA, CB, DB, DC, EA and EB relations was observed with the EG participants. By the other hand, subsequent tests of training on relations (same as the initial tests) showed the emergence of the BA, DB, DC, EA and EB relations with the CG. In general, EG participants presented better overall scores compared to the CG. The results presented herein point to oral counting as a facilitator for the numerical equivalence.