ABSTRACT
One of the reasons that, comparatively, there has been so little research on young children is that it is sometimes difficult to encourage them to clearly articulate their thinking. Indeed I remember when we were planning the The Quality of Pupil Learning Experiences (Bennett et al. 1984) in the early 1980s, a decision was made to focus on 7-year-olds as we might well run into difficulties with younger children being unable to tell us what they were thinking. By this I do not mean that they would have been dumbstruck at the idea of talking to strangers as, indeed, all our researchers were familiar members of the classroom environment. Rather I mean that younger children may have had difficulty putting their thinking into words.
