BEYOND COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE - CHILDRENS CLASS INCLUSION STRATEGIES, SUPERORDINATE CLASS CUES, AND VERBAL JUSTIFICATIONS

Seventy-two children from 4 to 10 years of age were given 2 class inclusion tasks in which the superordinate class was perceptually and linguistically marked or unmarked. A minor subclass question was also asked in order to estimate the rates of children's underlying solution strategies. The results indicated (a) that the performance of 4-6-year-olds was inflated by guessing, (b) that scores were higher in the marked task as compared with the unmarked task because of different rates of inclusion logic, and (c) that children's verbal justifications closely approximated their estimated true competence, contrary to common assumptions. The conclusion is drawn that the relation between verbal justification and intrapsychic inference is an important theoretical issue, not merely a question of measurement validity.