Young Children's Ordering Behaviour

Putting things in order is an important way of organising them. Children who can organise objects, according to colour, or size, or what they are used for, are well on the way to being able to think about organising other things, but young children have only limited ability to order objects and to plan their use, for example. Young children often don't notice features of objects that are important for organising them, and they tend to notice only one or two features at a time.
We have recently carried out a series of studies which examined young children's ability to put things in order according to size. Children arranged sticks of different lengths to make staircases,-they judged whether drawings and models showed good or bad staircases, and they chose the next stair for incomplete staircases.