The purposes of this study were: (1) to investigate the vocational interests of the bright, the normal, and the mentally retarded students; (2) to compare vocational interests among the bright, the normal, and the mentally retarded students; (3) to seek influencial factors and effective guidelines in the area of children´s career development. The sample was drawn from ten schools in Taipei city, composed of 192 fifth graders and 288 eight graders. Based on Holland´s paradigm (1973), the Vocational Interest Inventory (VII) in Chinese was devised and administered accordingly to the subjects. The VII consists of 118 items of six types of vocational interests, i.e., realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional. The data obtained were treated by a principle axis factor analysis and two and three-way analysis of covariance with social economic status as covariate. The main findings of this study were as follows: (1) The bright and normal students had similar factor structure in vocational preference, while the retarded showed less differentiation with only one factor emerged. (2) Grade effects were significant on five types of vocational interests, i.e., realistic, investigative, artistic, social and conventional. The higher grade students indicated more interests in these areas. (3) There were significant sex differences in the vocational choice: boys preferred realistic and investigative occupations, while girls preferred artistic and social ones. (4) There were significant intelligence effects: the retarded showed much fewer vocational interests in all types than the other two intelligence groups. It suggests that the retarded might be short of occupational information. On the other hand, the bright students expressed more interests in investigative and artistic domains than normal students. This is in accordance with their abilities as well as social expectations