Manutenção de classes de estímulos equivalentes: um estudo com alunos do ensino fundamental.

The maintenance of equivalence classes is affected by many experimental variables. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of classes size on the formation and maintenance of the equivalence relations with students of the Fundamental School (9 to 14 age old), controlling the numbers of trials in the tests during the teaching of the stimuli relations. The matching-to-sample procedure was used to teach 3 sets of 3 equivalence classes with 3, 4 or 5 stimuli, depending of the group. From the 14 participants selected, only 9 completed al the phases of the procedure. Of these nine participants all of them demonstrated equivalence class formation and in the maintenance test, 1, 2 and 2 participants continued to show more than 90% of correct responses, when classes had 3, 4 or 5 stimuli, respectively. It was concluded that class size did not affected the formation of equivalence classes, but it was a small effect on the class maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]