Formação conceitual à luz das teorias de Vygotsky e Nelson

Abstract

Our basic assumption for this work is that the abilities to appraise and to categorize are closely related, leading us to the conclusion that they are part of a single process: that of knowledge organization. In this paper, we will discuss specifically some topics involving knowledge organization as far as concept formation is concerned, searching to understand its nature. For this purpose, we have used as theoretical background the works on concept formation by Vygotsky ([1934] 2000) and Nelson (1998; 1986). We believe that Nelson’s views on young children cognitive processing, centered on the action context and on the children’s daily experiences can provide a more significant contribution for an extended vision of the nature of the process of concept formation than the ideas presented by Vygotsky who, in spite of stressing the importance of the context in concept formation, carried out his experiments based on artificial concepts. To check if the concepts become more abstract as time goes by or if they show to be limited to the individual’s context, connected to their memory (thus contextualized), we carry out a study with Elementary, Junior High and High School students as subjects, whose main purpose was to understand the nature of the participants’ concepts. The students were asked to define the terms “plant” and “animal” and took part in two classification activities using a set of cards, adapted from Panofsky, John-Steiner and Blackwell (1996), which consisted of twenty and one (21) pictures (07 belonging to the “plant” category and 14 to the “animal” category). From the analysis of the definitions obtained and of the justifications for grouping the items into categories, we could observe that there is not a single, exclusive base for the participants’ conceptualizations, that is, none of the categories has shown to be predominant. On the contrary, the category concepts are formed from internalized pieces of information about the world, no matter if these pieces of information are of a daily or of a more formal nature.