Closing Remarks on the Protocols

Abstract

And so on. The analyses could be continued almost indefinitely. Many other protocols could be presented, of the same children and of other children, to illustrate the same and other themes [1]. But we hope that enough has been said to demonstrate that it is indeed possible to write PSs that accurately model children’s seriation behaviour and are supported by converging evidence from empirical tests. Furthermore, the Pbs of non-seriators were shown to consist of Subsets of the production rules for corresponding seriators, and in this way three of the principal phenomena observed by Piaget (1952) in pre-seriating children emerged not just as a “failure” to seriate properly, but as the logically necessary consequence of the lack of certain rules. The same idea of “necessary consequence” applied to the protocols of children who can solve easy problems but not hard ones. Here we tried to show that a given PS, while it might be adequate for the easier tasks, would run into predictable difficulties or fail in characteristic ways on the harder ones. As is typical of process explanations, the same model is used to account for both successful and unsuccessful performance (cf. Braunstein, 1972).