Explaining Children’s Problem-Solving: Current Trends

Abstract

Problem-solving has been the task domain where the information processing approach took its home ground in psychology. Naturally, the same holds for the study of cognitive development. Along with memory, this task domain has served for discussions of the various models of growth in cognitive performance. A decade ago, basic architectural limits of the processing system like short-term memory capacity were challenged by the emerging view that domain-specific knowledge could account for some of the salient results as well. Strategies were not in the foreground as much, and the still young concept of metacognition played a rather modest role. When many of us met four years ago at the first Max Planck symposium of that kind, the emphasis had changed. Architectural, or “hardware” constrains had more or less vanished from the discussion and given way to a more extensive treatment of knowledge and, most of all, strategies and metacognition.