Some Behavioral Characteristics of the Partial Seriators Reconsidered

In this study the effects of the use of some of Piaget's criteria to make a distinction between partial and operational seriators were investigated. Therefore, attention was paid to three behaviorial characteristics in which the child constructed the series: concatenated transitive comparisons, the verification of transitive comparisons, and the number of self-corrections. Ss were 428 children from kindergarten and primary school, grades 1 to 6, who were observed while completing a set of six seriation tasks derived from Piaget's publications. It was found that with the use of these criteria no clear distinction could be made between partial and operational seriators. Furthermore, it was shown that the use of these criteria also led to contradictions regarding Piaget's predicted sequence of acquisition of different types of seriation. In contrast, it was demonstrated that the task characteristics strongly influenced the child's seriation behavior, which was not taken into account by Piaget when defining the characteristics for distinguishing partial and operational seriators.