In an investigation of the development of mapping as distinct from drawing, 39 middle and lower class Cambridge, Massachusetts children in kindergarten and first- and second-grades were shown a small three-dimensional model town, asked to make a smaller, three-dimensional copy of the model, and then asked to make a map showing each item in the town and where it was located. Changes seen in the children's approach to the mapping problem can be described in terms of the following five trends: (1) an increased tendency to render all items on the model terrain, and those only; (2) a decrease in the amount of detail used in rendering items; (3) an increase in accuracy of spatial arrangement and orientation of map symbols; (4) an increased concern for proportion; and (5) a shift in drawing angle from canonical, or frontal perspective, to a birds-eye view. In general, findings suggest that it is important to teach children the differences between various forms of graphic representation, rather than ignoring them or leaving them implicit. Not to do so, it would seem, amounts to a subtle kind of educational inequality which may have a major impact on the development of literacy, as understood in its most encompassing and fundamental sense. (RH)