Abstract
Children in kindergarten through third grade were given a series of specially designed discrimination tasks in which the stimuli were toy animals rather than conventional multidimensional (e.g., color-form-size) compounds. The purpose was to assess the hypothesis-testing skills of young children in a situation in which they would not tend to perseverate on irrelevant features of the stimuli. Their ability to make strategic decisions was studied across tasks, in terms of measures of their effective use of immediate feedback information, as well as in terms of measures of their long-term planning across trials. Although age differences were found, children at all age levels learned the tasks very rapidly and showed a high degree of sophistication in hypothesis testing. Improvement was shown across training tasks, particularly in long-term planning. The results demonstrate for the first time clear evidence of such long-term planning among kindergarten children.
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The authors are indebted to Philip Hershner, Gayle Klouda, and Kay Sabin for collecting and tabulating the data. We are also grateful to David L. Cronin, Richard E. Taylor, and Donald J. Tvedte in the Iowa City School District for their excellent cooperation. Funds for the purchase of computer time were made available by the Graduate College of the University of Iowa.
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Cantor, J.H., Spiker, C.C. Evidence for long-term planning in children’s hypothesis testing. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 22, 493–496 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333888
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333888