Competence

A study of young children's art and representational thought investigated the order in which representational concepts emerge in children's modeling in clay. It was predicted that children's three-dimensional representations of simple, symmetrical, and balanced familiar objects would be superior to their representations of complex, asymmetrical, unbalanced, and unfamiliar objects. Eight modeling tasks, including the modeling of objects, animals, and humans, were administered to 109 children between + and 13 years of age and to 18 college students. Subjects ' actions and verbalizations were recorded, and their sculptures were scored. Findings indicated that a restructuring is likely to occur in the way children approach v modeling task as they develop greater cognitive maturity. Young children first make use of three-dimensional representational concepts in the modeling task. They later develo