Children’s understanding of the idea of logical necessity: The effect of counter-suggestions

• Autor(a) principal: Lourenço,Orlando
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0870-82312019000300001
• topic: Piaget; Children; Counter-suggestions; Logical necessity; Operational arguments

This study examined the child’s understanding of the idea of logical necessity in 40 preoperational and 40 operational children in the context of a number conservation task and a liquids conservation task. The first task followed the typical Piagetian clinical method. The second task also used this method, but it employed counter-suggestions that Piaget, in a surprising way, rarely, if ever, used in his experiments. Children’s performance on the number conservation task allowed us, in a pre-experimental phase, to classify those children, aged between 5 and 7 years, as preoperational (40) or operational (40). Results show that: (1) from the number conservation task to the liquids conversation task, there was a significant change in preoperational and operational children’s epistemic status and its corresponding idea of logical necessity; (2) children refused a non-justified counter-suggestion coming from a putative knowledgeable adult less than a justified contra-suggestion coming from a hypothetical child; (3) operational children often invoked the identity argument on both tasks and the reversibility argument was practically absent; (4) children invoked the compensation argument on the liquids conservation task more than on the number conservation task.