Avaliação da conservação de quantidades discretas de pré-escolares prematuros e a termo: um estudo investigativo com o jogo de dominó.

Abstract

The technological progress, the amplification of the technical scientific knowledge in the area of health and the improvement in the attendance of Intensive Care Units facilitate, more and more, the intervention and the survival of children with adverse conditions at birth. The group of risk factors at birth includes premature and low birth weight, which are pointed out as dangerous elements to the neurological, cognitive, psychological, sensorial and motor infant development. Literature has demonstrated that Mathematics is considered the most damaging area at school among the premature and low birth weight newborn at preschool age. Based on the theoretical presuppositions of piagetian Genetic Epistemology, this research has investigated if premature born children with low weight in preschool age present notion of conservation of discreet quantities and if those are related to the difficulties in the construction of the notion of conservation of discreet quantities and, consequently, in the formation of the number concept. For this, 24 children from five to five years and eleven months old were evaluated; 12 premature with low weight (G1 – PT-BP) and 12 born to term and with weight above 2,500 g (G2 – AT) by means of the piagetian Operative Test of Correspondence one to one and the game of Domino. The procedure of data collection was properly accomplished in our filmed sessions, for application of the piagetian Operative Test of three Domino sessions and three Problem-solving situations using the same game. During the data collection, questions based on the piagetian Clinical Method were asked. Descriptive and statistical analyses, as well as qualitative discussions, were used to deal with the data. The research demonstrated that the participants of the two groups showed similar results both in the piagetian Operative Test and in the game of Domino and Problem-solving situations. We claim that the notion of conservation of discreet quantities is not fully built for G1 (PT – BP) neither for G2 (AT) concerning the expectation for the age.