title: Clinical evaluation of children's classification behavior.
abstract: Classification skills among 88 unimpaired school children (22 each at grades k, 2, 4, and 6) were evaluated using the Iconic-Symbolic (IS) test of the Muma Assessment Program (Muma and Muma, 1979). IS stimuli are 18 test plates, each of which contains pictures of three objects. The child is required to select any two of these pictures. Evaluation of response patterns is intended to permit judgement of subject classification strategy and changes therein across the middle childhood years. In the current study, children, after exposure to standard IS test procedures, were interviewed in order to determine the rationale they used in forming their paired-object classes. Results revealed little isomorphism between the rationale that children, in fact, employed in the task and the classification criteria presumed, a priori, by the IS procedures. Minimal differences were found in the degree of response-rationale isomorphism across the child sample. Implications of these results are discussed as they relate to the evaluation of classification skills among unimpaired and clinical populations.
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012660:Semantics