THE FORM OF INTELLECTUAL-DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN AGE 4 THROUGH 9

The development of intelligence as one may understand it through situa tions portrayed by Piaget has never yet entailed sufficient important longitudinal investigations, as was formerly the case with intelligenc e measured through tests. Yet such an approach seems to be highly nece ssary and relevant for questioning the coherence of the theory. The wo rk presented here analyzes the data of a study on operative thought wi th children aged 4 to 9. The same 104 children were tested five times with the same 25 Piagetian tasks, giving a total of 13,000 data points (104 children x 25 tasks x 5 occasions). First studied is the develop ment profile and the intra- and interindividual variabilities, the int raindividual changes, regressions, coherence of stages, and the decala ges. LISREL software is used in order to estimate several different de velopmental models. Classical methods of factorial analysis enable to comparison of the organization of the data with those that had previou sly been accounted for in scientific literature. Two major conclusions are drawn. On the one hand, there are manifest indicators of synergy in the development of the various behaviors, such indicators being lia ble to be compared to those accounted by the g factor in the tradition al psychometrical approach, and, further, some validity and coherence of the concept of stage can be observed. On the other hand, it has not been possible to validate specific problems of behavior organization liable to be inferred through theory, namely in the fields of both num ber and space representation genesis.