Structured Tasks
Structured tasks allow us to assess young children’s knowledge. In these tasks, an experimenter presents children with images and/or objects and asks children a series of pre-determined questions about them. Children’s answers to the questions reveal what they know.
![The image shows a task that uses three pictures to capture logical relationships. On the left-hand side of the image is a larger box, which shows a shoot of a plant on a mound of dirt. There are two arrows leading from the square and terminating at two smaller squares on the right-hand side of the image. The upper box shows a large tuft of herbal-looking plant on an identical mound of dirt. In the lower box, a smaller shoot grows from the same mound of dirt. Its leaves are different from the other two plants. Between the arrows there is a question mark, which refers to the question of which of these plants the shoot on the left side will resemble after growth.](/477195/original-1598522389.jpg?t=eyJ3aWR0aCI6MjQ2LCJvYmpfaWQiOjQ3NzE5NX0%3D--8d8179b211a5aa0ab195cc9c9658ea640bc8dc5a)
© MPI for Human Development
For example, in one of our ongoing studies with preschool-aged children, we use structured tasks to assess children’s knowledge about plants and their memory for different plant properties.