A psicogénese dos argumentos operatórios: identidade, compensação e reversibilidade em provas piagetianas de conservação

In Piaget's work, operational arguments (Identity, Reversibility, and Compensation), are exceedingly important. To this one may add the ease of identifying them in children's responses. Strangely, however, and as far as we know, Piaget did not examine the question of the psychogenesis of operational arguments, possibly because he did not make use of longitudinal methods. These types of questions, however, are important, both in terms of theory and in terms of a better understanding of the emergence of operational thought in the child. We sought in this work to shed light on some central issues in this domain, namely: (a) Are there differences in the frequency of use of the three arguments? (b) Are there differences in the probability of each of the arguments being the first to be used when the child moves from a non-conservation to a conservation stage? (c) Are there differences in the relative frequency of arguments as a function of tasks? We followed a group of children for four months, with eight moments of assessment, employing four different conservation tasks. We found that the Identity argument was most often invoked by children to justify conservation, and also seemed to emerge most often before any other in the transition to operational thought. On the contrary, the Reversibility argument was the least utilized. We also found that the type of task influences the pattern of argument use. These results contradict those invoked by Piaget when he sustains that the emergence of arguments does not follow a determined order and that their appearance in children's performance is equally likely. The interpretation of results, however, was hindered by the loss of a large number of children across assessment waves, as the initial sample of 68 was reduced to 17 children completing all assessments.