Identificando comportamentos pré-requisitos para o ensino da adição e da subtração

Abstract

The educator can carry out the teaching starting by the behaviors already established in the student s repertoire, which reminds us the importance of developing instruments to assess this repertoire of the student.. The purpose of the present research was to construct a sequence of prerequisite behaviors to the teaching of addition and subtraction, to construct an instrument that would allow us to describe a sample of the child s performance on tasks involving those behaviors identified in the sequence, and to test this instrument with children. The construction of the sequence of behaviors was made through he comparison of the behaviors proposed in the National Reference Curriculum to Child Education (1998), which guides the teaching of children in pre-schools; in the National Curriculum Parameters to Elementary Teaching (2000), devoted to the teaching of children in elementary schools; in elementary mathematics skills teaching programs presented by behavior analysts; and in didactic books. The comparison between these different works indicated that they were complementary, proposing behaviors related to the behaviors proposed by others, and making a gradual increase in the difficulty between behaviors. The sequence was composed by behaviors that involved the relation between spoken numbers, quantities, and numerals, comparisons between quantities and numerals, ordering quantities and numerals in ascending and descending sequences and addition and subtraction signs. The tasks that tested these behaviors involved simple discrimination, non-conditional discrimination, conditional discrimination, and constructed-response.. The instrument built, which had the sequence of behaviors as the starting point, was tested with a pre-school child and two elementary school children. The stimuli used in each task were either printed in sheets of paper or figures, sets and numerals presented separately..After being instructed, the child emitted an active response and consequences contingent to his/her participation on the tasks were made available at the end of the session. Based on the children s performances, it could be noticed that the instrument (although needed to have some tasks reformulated) was useful for identifying irrelevant dimensions of the stimulus that controlled correct and incorrect responses, which frequently come unnoticed by the teachers in classrooms, and also for identifying that the mistakes committed by the children were mostly behaviors involving numeric values bigger than three and complex behaviors that involved a combination of the concept of number and some other concept