The proposed research will investigate how preschool children use their knowledge of familiar events or scripts in planning. A model of how script knowledge is used in increasingly more complex and flexible planning is proposed and tested in three studies of planning in children from 3 to 5 years. The central idea behind the model is that scripts provide children with mental representations of goal-directed sequences of activities thy can use to anticipate and plan events long before they are capable of the kinds of cognitive and executive strategies studied in the problem solving literature on planning Study 1 investigates the range of children's planning as displayed in an experiment task: Children will be asked to plan and execute shopping trips for 2 events either consecutively or simultaneously. Study 2 will investigate children's planning in a real-world event with varying levels of familiarity. Study 3 is an interview study of children's verbal scripts and plans for a variety of familiar events. These studies will delineate the relationship between children's script knowledge and their early planning skills. The model of development which will result from this research can be used in theory development as well as in the development of instructional techniques for promoting children's planning skills.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter