ABSTRACT
Children from age six onward spend a large part of their lives in elementary schools, learning school subjects whose formal structure is not very different from that of the subjects they will study in high school and college. Hence, it is perhaps not inappropriate to report some research on individual differences in adult competence in a subject, elementary physics, that is typically taught in high school and college. An understanding of the bases of adult competence may cast light on the skills the child must attain enroute to such competence, in particular prerequisite skills in arithmetic, reading, and algebra. Moreover, the method of analysis used here could also be used in studying the knowledge demands of elementary school subjects.
