Thirty mildly retarded children participated in a study in which 24 of the children were trained to a prespecified criterion on one of 3 logical operations tasks involving length: identity conservation, equivalence conservation, or transitivity. The ease with which the concepts were trained suggested that the natural order of emergence was transitive inference → equivalence conservation → identity conservation. Significant amounts of generalization to untrained concepts (interconceptual) were evident, as well as generalization to the untrained dimension of weight (intraconceptual). It was concluded that intensive training to a prespecified criterion is capable of producing generalization to concepts dealing with logicomathematical reasoning in mentally retarded children.
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