Efeitos da exposição continuada a regras descritivas sobre o comportamento escolar de crianças

Abstract

Children histories have been used as ludic-didactic resource in installation of behaviors. In this literature, these behaviors are usually described in a descriptive rules way, describing general relationships among events.The study analyzed the efects of continued exposure to the descriptive rules presented in children histories about the frequency and time of commitment in pro-study behaviors, in four 7 to 8-years old children. The study had three stages. In the first stage, semi-structured interviews with the children teachers were made to colect some reports about children performance in school activities. In the second stage, cursive registers of children behavior in the classroom were made to identify occurence and frequency of the behaviors reported by the teachers. Then, it was possible to select and categorize the main behaviors to be observed in the study. The selected behaviors were: to Copy and Answer the exercise and to Get visa. The third stage was a base line session and six phases. In the base line session, a register of the occurence of these behaviors were made with the objective to have a base line of the frequency and duration of them. The six phases consisted of reading a child history and a register session of the occurence of the main behaviors. In each phase, a different history was read. It had a descriptive rule describing positive consequences of the selected behaviors and negative consequences of behaviors that didn't match with the selected ones. The results showed that all participants, in the last register session, increased meaningfully the time spent in copying and answering the exercise activities, as well as, the number of times that these behaviors were emitted, in relation to the base line session.They all emitted the Getting visa behavior in the register session. These results sugest that the continued exposure to the descriptive rules in children histories contributed to install or increase the frequency of the Copying and Aswering the exercise and Getting visa, as well as to increase time of commitment of children in these activities.