Measuring The Cognitive Structures Of Pre-School Children: A Multidimensional Scaling Analysis Of Classification...

The purpose of the research was to measure the cognitive structures of five and six-year old children using a sorting task commonly employed by Piaget and also using a similarity estimation task. Multidimensional scaling techniques were used to analyze both sets of data. The similarity analysis revealed that 92% of the children had stable, organized cognitive structures for the experimental stimuli while an analysis of the sorting data (for the same students) indicated that only 30% of these children had stable structures. The study strongly suggests that the demand characteristics of sorting tasks make them relatively poor techniques for evaluating cognitive structures in children as compared with similarity tasks.