A developmental and practical studies of individual differences in problemsloving and development of curriculum in early childhood.

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Followed are the results gained through the longitudinal researches over two years on the kindergarten children's cognitive styles and their behavior in free-play activities. 1. Over the years from younger classes to older classes in the kindergarten, the cognitive styles of impulsivereflective dimension remained stable, along with the stabiltiy in response latency and the number of errors. This result contradicts the other reports in the past which claimed the low staiblity at these stages of age. 2. The cognitive styles of field-dependence and field-independence also showed their stability through these ages, and the reflective style was related to the field-independent style, as was the impulsive style to the field-dependent style. 3. On the tasks to measure the fielddependent and field-endependent styles, kindergarten children showed peculiar characteristics in their responses ; interference and accelerarion caused by outer factors. These results indicated that there were differences between kindergarten children and adults in the speed of information processing and also in the ability to pay selective and intentional attention to tasks to be solved. 4. As for the kindergarten children's self-assertion, in dealing with the kindergarten children who showed strong self-assertion, kindergarten teachers tended to reason out the matters and they showed verbal and behavioral acceptance and rejection equally to the children. To those who made less self-assertion, they showed verbal acceptance in all situations. In addition, the responses of kindergarten teachers to kindergarten children change with their cognitive styles and also with the time of the kindergarten year. With these results in othes study, year-round curriculums and daily programs are now being discussed and developed so as to fully utilize kindergarten children's individual differences.