Abstract
The present study examined factors that affect planning in ill-defined problem-solving by children with mild to intellectual disabilities. The participants, 24 five-year-olds and 24 eight-year-olds without disabilities, and 35 children with mild (17 children, average age, 15 years old) to moderate (18 children, average age, 12 years old) intellectual disabilities, matched on mental age (MA) with the other children, were requested to build something like a staircase with small blocks, so that a doll could "walk up the mountain." The trends in the participants' performance in generating ideas, preparing behavior, building the structure, and self-evaluating were analyzed. The main results were as follows: (a) the understanding of the instructions prior to planning by the children with intellectual disabilities with mental age of 5 years old did not follow the problem requirements; (b) the children who were over the mental age of 5 were reluctant to use knowledge related to the contents of the instructions; (c) the children whose mental age was 8 showed a tendency to do local planning; and (d) because the rule was understood only vaguely, a rough goal state generated their ideas, and the children could only partially accomplish the goal.
