Young Children's Problem Solving Research Articles

The impact of severity of motor delay, timing of task mastery, and START-play intervention on the development of means-end problem solving in young children

BackgroundChildren with motor delays are at increased risk for delayed means-end problem-solving (MEPS) performance. ObjectivesTo evaluate children with motor delays: 1) the impact of motor delay severity and MEPS mastery timing on developmental trajectories of MEPS; and 2) the effectiveness of Sitting Together And Reaching To Play (START-Play) intervention for improving MEPS. MethodsThis represents a secondary analysis from a multi-site randomized controlled trial, with blinded assessors and prospective registration. Children with mild or significant motor delays (n = 112, mean age=10.80, SD=2.59 months at baseline) were randomly assigned to START-Play or usual care early intervention (UC-EI) and assessed at five visits across one year using the Means-End Problem-Solving Assessment Tool that included three 30-second MEPS trials per visit. Task mastery occurred at the first visit the child achieved the highest level of performance in at least two of the three trials. Multilevel analyses evaluated trajectories of MEPS outcomes dependent upon the timing of MEPS mastery, motor delay severity, and intervention group. ResultsAt baseline, children with mild motor delays demonstrated better MEPS than children with significant delays, but this difference was only observed for children who achieved mastery late. Children with significant delays demonstrated greater improvements in MEPS in the post-intervention phase compared to children with mild delays. No MEPS differences were found between START-Play and UC-EI. ConclusionMotor delay severity and timing of task mastery impacted MEPS trajectories, whereas START-Play intervention did not impact MEPS for children with motor delays. Clinical Trials Registry identifierNCT02593825 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02593825)

DISCOVERing and nurturing creative problem solving in young children: An exploratory study

The purpose of this exploratory study of creative problem-solving characteristics of young children was to (a) determine whether the percentage of creativity-relevant behaviors declined, stayed the same, or increased as children entered school and progressed to the first grade (ages 4, 5, and 6) and (b) describe differences and similarities across the three ages and ten domains in the assessment. Using a playbased assessment with developmentally appropriate, flexible materials and activities that were engaging to young children, trained observers with tablet computers administered the assessments, took photographs and videos, observed problemsolving behaviors, entered the behaviors into a database, reviewed children's performance with others in talent groupings, and made decisions about children's strengths across the ten areas of ability. Across the talent areas, of the 29 behaviors included, the percentage of 18 creative problem-solving behaviors increased across the three years, 9 behaviors declined at age 5 and increased at age 6, and from age 5 to age 6, 4 behaviors declined. The patterns were different in different talent areas. Consistent with results of other studies of this age group, we concluded that agerelated development, teaching methods, culture, and other factors interact in the development of creative problem solving. The use of creativity-enhancing teaching methods can make a positive difference in children's development of creative problem solving.

Early motor skills predict the developmental trajectory of problem solving in young children with motor delays.

The purpose of this study was to quantify the relationship between early motor skills, such as sitting, and the development of problem-solving skills in children with motor delays. Motor (Gross Motor Function Measure) and problem-solving (Assessment of Problem-Solving in Play) skills of 134 children 7-16 months adjusted age at baseline with motor delay were assessed up to 5 times over 12 months. Participants were divided into two groups: mild and significant motor delay. Motor and problem-solving scores had large (r's=0.53-0.67) and statistically significant (p's>.01) correlations at all visits. Baseline motor skills predicted baseline and change in problem solving over time. The associations between motor and problem-solving skills were moderated by level of motor delay, with children with significant motor delay generally having stronger associations compared to those with mild motor delay. These findings suggest that overall baseline motor skills are predictive of current and future development of problem-solving skills and that children with significant motor delay have a stronger and more stable association between motor and problem-solving skills over time. This highlights that children with motor delays are at risk for secondary delays in problem solving, and this risk increases as degree of motor delay increases.

Measuring Early Problem-Solving in Young Children with Motor Delays: A Validation Study

Aim There is a lack of evidence-based tools for measuring problem-solving in young children with motor delays. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the construct validity and responsiveness of the Assessment of Problem-Solving in Play. Methods 125 young children (10.72, SD 2.62 months) with mild, moderate, and severe motor delays were assessed with the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Third Edition Cognitive Scale and the Assessment of Problem-Solving in Play up to 4 times over 12 months. The baseline and change over time assessment scores were compared. Results The Assessment of Problem-Solving in Play was strongly, positively correlated with the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Third Edition Cognitive Scale raw scores at baseline (r=.83, p<.001) and for changes in scores across time (r=.64, p<.001). On average, participants demonstrated positive change in problem-solving scores across time. Participants with severe motor delay scored lower at baseline and changed less as compared to other participants. Conclusions Results provide evidence for the construct validity and responsiveness of the Assessment of Problem-Solving in Play scores in quantifying problem-solving in young children with motor delays 7-27 months of age.

Situated collaboration and problem solving in young children's digital gameplay

AbstractCollaboration is an important aspect of social activity associated with young children's digital gameplay. Children organise their participation as they communicate with and support one another, through sharing knowledge and problem‐solving strategies, displaying their expertise, encouraging others and creatively exploring possibilities for collaborative game moves. Drawing on a social interactional perspective, we explore the situated and embodied practices of the young players aged 3–8 years. We present three video ethnographic case studies of young children's everyday peer interactions from three different settings and age groups: Australia (home), Norway (pre‐school) and Sweden (afterschool). Across these settings, the findings identify how children collaborate with one another to progress the game by using multiple strategies, including instructing each other, monitoring each other's actions and problem solving. In the process, collaborative peer culture was maintained and built as the players worked towards problem solutions that require taking each other's perspectives, and sharing digital devices and skills. This focus on children's situated language use and assemblage of multimodal resources shows their moment‐by‐moment collaborative action. These multimodal interactions create opportunities for peer and sibling learning without the presence of an adult. The collaborative activity was a strategic resource used by the children in their digital game playing. In capturing young children's own strategies, we highlight their agency in learning occurring through social interaction and gameplay.

Give me a hand: Differential effects of gesture type in guiding young children's problem-solving.

Adults' gestures support children's learning in problem-solving tasks, but gestures may be differentially useful to children of different ages, and different features of gestures may make them more or less useful to children. The current study investigated parents' use of gestures to support their young children (1.5 - 6 years) in a block puzzle task (N = 126 parent-child dyads), and identified patterns in parents' gesture use indicating different gestural strategies. Further, we examined the effect of child age on both the frequency and types of gestures parents used, and on their usefulness to support children's learning. Children attempted to solve the puzzle independently before and after receiving help from their parent; half of the parents were instructed to sit on their hands while they helped. Parents who could use their hands appear to use gestures in three strategies: orienting the child to the task, providing abstract information, and providing embodied information; further, they adapted their gesturing to their child's age and skill level. Younger children elicited more frequent and more proximal gestures from parents. Despite the greater use of gestures with younger children, it was the oldest group (4.5-6.0 years) who were most affected by parents' gestures. The oldest group was positively affected by the total frequency of parents' gestures, and in particular, parents' use of embodying gestures (indexes that touched their referents, representational demonstrations with object in hand, and physically guiding child's hands). Though parents rarely used the embodying strategy with older children, it was this strategy which most enhanced the problem-solving of children 4.5 - 6 years.

Preschoolers’ cooperative problem solving: Integrating play and problem solving

Cooperative problem solving with peers plays a central role in promoting children’s cognitive and social development. This article reviews research on cooperative problem solving among preschool-age children in experimental settings and social play contexts. Studies suggest that cooperative interactions with peers in experimental settings are not as consistently beneficial to young children’s cognitive growth as they are for school-age children. In contrast, both theory and empirical research suggest that social play like that seen in early childhood classrooms is a context in which young children gain critical knowledge from peer cooperation. However, these contexts differ in how much they allow children to create and sustain their own joint goals, which likely influences their learning from cooperative interactions in experimental settings. Features of cooperative social play that allow preschool children to create joint goals are considered, and suggestions for future research are proposed to integrate these features into experimental settings in order to provide a fuller understanding of the development of cooperative problem solving in young children and its benefits.

Young children's research behaviour? Children aged four to eight years finding solutions at home and at school

Children's research abilities have become increasingly recognised by adults, yet children remain excluded from the academy. This restricts children's freedom to make choices in matters affecting them, underestimates their capabilities and denies children particular rights. The present paper reports on young children's problem-solving as part of a small-scale interpretive study designed to reconceptualise ways in which children's naturalistic behaviours may be perceived as research. Within a ‘jigsaw methodology’ designed to accommodate participatory, emancipatory and inductive approaches, multi-modal case studies were co-constructed with children aged four to eight (n = 138) and their practitioners (n = 15) in three primary schools and with selected children and their primary carers participating at home. Outcomes include the reassertion by academics of problem-solving as research behaviour, the capturing of young children's engagements in problem-solving as research behaviour and the identification of a range of factors affecting the children's problem-solving activity, including high-order thinking.

Worry, Beliefs about Worry and Problem Solving in Young Children

Childhood worry is common, and yet little is known about why some children develop pathological worry and others do not. Two theories of adult worry that are particularly relevant to children are Davey's problem-solving model in which perseverative worry occurs as a result of thwarted problem-solving attempts, and Wells' metacognitive model, in which positive and negative beliefs about worry interact to produce pathological worry. The present study aimed to test hypotheses that levels of worry in young children are associated with poor or avoidant solution generation for social problems, and poor problem-solving confidence. It also aimed to explore beliefs about worry in this age group, and to examine their relationships with worry, anxiety and age. Fifty-seven young children (6-10 years) responded to open ended questions about social problem-solving situations and beliefs about worry, and completed measures of worry, anxiety and problem-solving confidence. Children with higher levels of worry and anxiety reported using more avoidant solutions in social problem situations and children's low confidence in problem solving was associated with high levels of worry. Children as young as 6 years old reported both positive and negative beliefs about worry, but neither were associated with age, gender, or level of anxiety or worry. RESULTS indicate similarities between adults and children in the relationships between problem-solving variables and worry, but not in relationships between beliefs about worry and worry. This may be due to developmental factors, or may be the result of measurement issues.

The Development of Problem Solving in Young Children: A Critical Cognitive Skill

Problem solving is a signature attribute of adult humans, but we need to understand how this develops in children. Tool use is proposed as an ideal way to study problem solving in children less than 3 years of age because overt manual action can reveal how the child plans to achieve a goal. Motor errors are as informative as successful actions. Research is reviewed on intentional actions, beginning with block play and progressing to picking up a spoon in different orientations, and finally retrieving objects with rakes and from inside tubes. Behavioral and kinematic measures of motor action are combined to show different facets of skill acquisition and mastery. We need to design environments that encourage and enhance problem solving from a young age. One goal of this review is to excite interest and spur new research on the beginnings of problem solving and its elaboration during development.

How to solve a problem like numeracy

Although the content of the numeracy area of learning has not changed, its subtle name change highlights the importance of developing young children's problem solving and reasoning skills.

A study on the effect of constructive play on young children's problem solving

A study on the effect of constructive play on young children's problem solving

Metacognitive macroevaluations in mathematical problem solving

This paper focuses on the role of evaluation in mathematics in 749 elementary school children. The macroevaluative skills and calibration scores of high versus low mathematical problem solvers were contrasted as measures of metacognition. No relevant calibration differences were found for gender. In addition, the performances of children with mathematics learning disabilities could not be explained according to the maturational lag hypothesis. Finally, although macrometacognitive evaluation and calibration seem attractive alternatives for time-consuming on-line metacognitive assessment techniques, our data show that a global and retrospective assessment of the macroevaluation is not always enough to get the picture of mathematical problem solving in young children.

Age differences in patterns of spontaneous production of strategies for analogy problems among five- to eight-year-old children

The study examined the applicability of analogies in intervention programmes aimed at promoting flexible problem solving in young children who have difficulty in attending spontaneously to novel tasks. Children of three grade levels participated: kindergarten, first grade and second grade. A considerable number of children of all three age groups demonstrated variability in their strategy use for analogy problems over time. This result indicates that changes in ‘normal’ children’s spontaneous construction of appropriate strategies for analogy problems extend beyond the age of eight years. Significant age differences were found in children’s patterns of spontaneous strategy use. By the second part of sessions, approximately a quarter of the children in the oldest two age groups fairly consistently reported use of appropriate strategies, whereas the youngest children did not. Twenty-nine per cent of the children in the youngest age group were consistently non-strategic across the study period. Based on these results it is not reasonable to expect that young at-risk children will benefit from a presentation of analogies without any instruction or explicit suggestion from the experimenter or teacher. This finding does, however, not mean that analogies could not be useful to them. Therefore, the authors recommend promoting the use of analogies in five- to six-year-old children through training, and examining whether this youngest group of children will benefit from training, prior to the experiment, that includes various analogy tasks with different solution principles.

Learning from Their Mistakes: Glimpses of symbolic functioning in two-and-a-half to three-year-old children

In this cross-sectional study done in the United States, 19 female and 17 male children ( N =36) ranging in age from 30- to 36-months ( M =33 months, 8 days) were presented with two different search and retrieval type problems to solve. Examination of the data revealed clear age-related differences between children who fluidly and efficiently problem solve using symbolically mediated knowledge and those who do not. Younger children tended to rely on a trial and error, motor-based strategy for solving the problems presented, whereas older children consistently used symbolic strategies. This conclusion supports findings from other similar studies. Further analyses of the data, however, revealed an interesting phenomenon in the form of a patterned, non-random error. This error pattern, a perseverative-type error, and the other problem-solving strategies used by the two-year-olds and young threes in this study offer insight into how young children become efficient users of symbols. Facilitating the development of symbolic problem solving in young children is discussed.

The Relationship Between Creativity and Conformity Among Preschool Children

The current study investigated the relationship between creativity and conformity based on the work of Starkweather (1964). The subjects were 45 preschool children. Creativity was assessed using the Multidimensional Stimulus Fluency Measure (Moran, Sawyers, Fu, &amp; Milgram, 1983), an original thinking task. Two forms of conformity were assessed: social conformity and impersonal conformity using the Starkweather Social Conformity Test and the Starkweather Form Boards Test respectively (Starkweather, 1964). Starkweather's hypothesis of a curvilinear relationship between conformity and creativity was found for the social conformity task (X2 = 11.69, p &lt; .01). The findings support the hypothesis that highly conforming and highly nonconforming children do not score as high on creativity measurements as their freedom of expression (i.e., not following a rigid pattern of conforming/nonconforming) counterparts. Chi‐square analyses revealed significantly more children in the high creativity and freedom of expression group as compared to the low creativity and conforming/nonconforming children. That is, significantly fewer children were found in the low conformity/low creativity cell and more in the low conformity/high creativity cell than were expected by chance. No differences were found for impersonal conformity, perhaps due to the insensitivity of the instrumentation to assess conformity. It is concluded that freedom of expression may be seen as an important personality trait in the identification and nurturance of creative potential and problem solving in young children.

Ready, set, goal: The effect of cues on generalization and problem solving in young children

This paper provides evidence for a possible generalization of Knoblich and colleagues’ representational change theory [Knoblich, G., Ohlsson, S., Haider, H., & Rhenius, D. (1999). Constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition in insight problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 1534–1555; Knoblich, G., Ohlsson, S., & Raney, G. E. (2001). An eye movement study of insight problem. Memory and Cognition, 29, 1000–1009] outside its original scope of application. While this theory has been proposed to explain insight problem solving, we demonstrate here that its main concepts, namely, constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition, are applicable to incremental problem solving. In a first experiment, we confirm, as already shown by problem solving and reasoning researchers, that individuals avoid the construction of alternative representations of the problems when possible. In the second and third experiments, we show that alternative representations of arithmetic problems are easier to construct and maintain when they violate constraints of narrow rather than wide scope. The specificity of insight problem solving is discussed in the light of these new findings.

Symbolic Problem Solving: An Important Piece of the Emergent Literacy Puzzle

The understanding of the representational nature of symbols and the ability to actively internalize and use these symbols is a crucial developmental step in the emergence of reading and writing literacy. Information was obtained from a study briefly summarized in this report which confirmed that children become able to understand and exploit external physical symbols by age three. How symbolic problem solving fits into the emergent literacy picture and its importance in providing the careful observer with a glimpse into the overall symbolic capacity of the young child are considered. Implications for encouraging problem solving in young children are discussed, and it is concluded that an atmosphere in which children feel safe taking risks, an environment rich in materials that promote symbol use, and caring adults who act to encourage, rather than discourage are essential elements in the creation of competent, confident young problem solvers; active, creative thinkers; and efficient and motivated readers ...

Two children's anticipations, beliefs, and motivations

This paper discusses the roles played by anticipation, belief, and motivation in two young children's problem solving activity. It is argued that a solver's beliefs and motivations are intimately related. The analysis also identifies an increasingly global hierarchy of anticipations corresponding to specific conceptual structures or problem representations, heuristics, and beliefs. Analogies drawn from the philosophy of science and from the field of artificial intelligence are used to illustrate that the discussion of the two children's behaviors may have some generality.

Interpersonal problem-solving in young children: a cognitive approach to prevention.

An interpersonal cognitive problem-solving (ICPS) intervention, designed to reduce and prevent impulsive and inhibited behaviors in black low socioeconomic status (SES) 4- and 5-year-olds, was implemented by teachers and evaluated over a 2-year period. In the first year, 113 children were trained and 106 were not. The 131 still-available in kindergarten were divided into four groups: Twice-trained (n = 39); Once-trained, Nursery (n = 30); Once-trained, Kindergarten (n = 35), and Never-trained controls (n = 27). Findings showed that (a) ICPS impact on behavior lasted at least 1 full year, (b) training was as effective in kindergarten as in nursery, and (c) for this age and SES group, 1 year of intervention had the same immediate behavior impact as 2. Further, well-adjusted children trained in nursery were less likely to begin showing behavioral difficulties over the 2-year period than were comparable controls, highlighting implications of the ICPS approach for primary prevention.