ABSTRACT
Many areas of education focus on teaching children how to produce specific kinds of external notations. Although most children appreciate the usefulness of creating such representations by their eighth year, their ability to actually create useful external representations is highly variable and task specific until adolescence. Children generated the sequence of moves themselves within a well-defined problem to assure they had sufficient understanding of the action sequence to be represented. The closed structure of the problem made it possible to define what specific information needed to be included in the external representation. The chapter examines a complex relationship between what information is included, how that information is represented, and notational adequacy. Future research should address why figural notations with explicit sequential information were not as adequate as linguistic notations.
