Intelligence as a correlate of children's problem solving

Previous work on children's problem solving was extended by directly comparing the strategies of intellectually gifted, average, and mentally retarded children on 2 two-dimensional integration problems--the balance scale and inclined plane. Comparisons of the distributions of strategies for each group showed that most gifted children integrated dimensional information by addition and many average children used lexicographic strategies. Mentally retarded children relied on a single dimension of the balance scale, but they were more likely to use lexicographic strategies for the inclined plane. Possible explanations for the large number of unclassified mentally retarded children were discussed.