Planning in Context: Developmental and Situational Considerations

Abstract

An analysis of the components of planning is presented that incorporates problem representation, goal selection, a decision to plan, strategy choice, strategy execution, and monitoring. We argue that which components are required and which developmental changes are triggered or revealed depend on the planning task. We present analyses of three tasks typically used to study planning: the Tower of Hanoi; errand scheduling; and story comprehension. We argue that the performance on the Tower of Hanoi task reflects representational and monitoring demands, and that story comprehension depends strongly on social comprehension and monitoring. Because many everyday plans like running errands have prepackaged components and take place in a less controllable environment, affective and attributional components affect most strongly the choice of goals, decision to plan, and strategy choice. We then speculate on the course of development of each processing component and the complex interplay of cognition, beliefs, attitudes, and motivation in assembling and implementing plans to handle different tasks. Finally, we consider changes across the life span in the kinds of plans that are generated.