Preschoolers' practical thinking and problem solving: The acquisition of an optimal solution strategy

This study is an investigation of the strategies used by preschool-aged children (ages 3 and 4) to accomplish a practical task. For the main part of the study, 24 children were engaged on three separate occasions in a mathematically oriented activity designed to test their problem-solving skills and their ability to learn from and increase their efficiency in relation to a repeated task. The exercise required participants to satisfy customer requests for orders of vegetables in a “play store” setting. Each order request in the task could be successfully satisfied by a variety of different solution strategies. The number of moves used to satisfy each order, as well as the strategy type employed, were recorded and coded. Participants also took part in extensive arithmetic pre- and posttests. After repeated exposure to the task, participants became significantly more efficient in their choice of a solution strategy: that is, they increasingly chose solution strategies requiring fewer physical moves.