A seriation task (assembling a set of nesting cups) was used in this study to examine developmental changes in young children's ability to restructure a situation. Forty young children, eight each at 18, 24, 30, 36, and 40 months of age, participated in the study. Each child was presented with five nesting cups and was told he or she could play with them. No specific instructions were given. If after 1 - 1 1/2 minutes of spontaneous manipulation of the cups, the child had not completely seriated them, the experimenter took the cups and showed the subject (without letting the child see the assembly process) that the cups all fit together. Then the separate cups were given back to the child for further manipulation. The trial ended when (a) the child completely seriated the cups, (b) the child refused to continue, or (c) two minutes had elapsed. All children's activities were videotaped, and all their moves (any combination of two or more cups) were scored as correct or incorrect. An error involved any instance in which two or more cups were combined in any way other than perfect seriation. Results indicated that while the subjects did not differ with age in the likelihood they would try to correct a set of nonseriated cups, they did differ in the kind of self correction strategies they employed. Correction strategies ranged from very simple procedures applied to single cups to more complex strategies involving the relationships among all the cups. (Author/MP)