Comportamento matemático: relações ordinais e inferência transitiva em pré-escolares

Abstract

Basic skills on mathematics can be taught directly to pre-scholars in risk of learning difficulties. This research examined the behavior control by ordinal relations in 14 children (mean age: 5 years and 1 mosnth old) with low school performance from a municipal school in Vitoria. Initially, the students were individually assessed; after that a computerized teaching procedure was applied to teach ordinal performances and then the occurrence of generative performance was assessed. All the children met the teaching criterion, thereby establishing the behavior control by ordinal relations. In the transference of stimuli function assessment, 14 children ordered new sequences of stimuli with the computerized procedure and eight children with the non-computerized procedure. We may conclude that basic skills for learning mathematics can be taught directly in spite of the failures in the initial repertoire of the child.