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143 9- and 10-year-oId children were classified into high- and Jow-IQ groups and given 4 different sort/recall lists (baseline, training, near [immediate] extension, far [l-week] extension) to assess training and extension of an organizational memory strategy. All children received categorized items of moderate typicality for Phases 1, 3, and 4. For Phase 2, children were assigned to either a training or control group, with half of the children in each group receiving category typical items and the others category atypical items. Levels of recall, sorting, and clustering were greater in Phase 2 for high-IQ children, for the typical lists, and for trained children. Both the high- and low-IQ children trained with typical items continued to show high levels of recall on the near extension phase. No group of subjects maintained high levels of recall after 1 week, although levels of sorting and/or clustering on the extension trials remained high for all groups of subjects except the low-IQ control children. This latter pattern (elevated sorting/clustering with low levels of recall) is an indication of a utilization deficiency, a phase in strategy development when children use a strategy but gain little or no benefit n performance. The results provide evidence for IQ, training, and material effects in the demonstration of a utilization deficiency.
High- and low-IQ children in the first, third, and fifth grades performed two free-recall tasks: a sort-recall task with sets of categorically related pictures, and a class-recall task, with children recalling the current members of their school class. All children were deemed to be experts concerning the composition of their school class, but, unlike experts in other domains, had no special motivation associated with their expertise. Recall and clustering on both tasks were high. The high-IQ children performed better than low-IQ children only on the sort-recall task. IQ was significantly correlated with measures of performance on the sort-recall task but not on the class-recall task. The results reflect the fact that the memory benefits associated with being an expert (here, elimination of IQ effects) are related to the greater knowledge the expert possesses and not to factors of motivation.
A MODEL of good information processing is sketched, describing how metacognitive knowledge influences strategy selection and use. Three factors pose particular problems for learning disabled students as they attempt to acquire metacognitive knowledge and to use study strategies productively: neurological impairments; deficiencies in general world knowledge; and negative beliefs, attitudes, and styles that limit self-efficacy. Creating an educational atmosphere that explicitly builds conceptual (domain-specific) knowledge and teaches positive beliefs about learning potential is essential in promoting metacognitively-oriented instruction.
This study explored the differential effects of strategy training on German and American elementaryschool children and assessed the role of parents in the development of their children's strategic behavior and metacognition. 184 German and 161 American children were pretested on memory and metamemory tasks. Children were then assigned to either an organizational strategy training condition or a control condition. All children were tested on the maintenance and far-transfer of the strategy and task-related metamemory 1 week following training. Parents completed questionnaires about strategy instruction in the home. Strategy maintenance and metacognition were reassessed 6 months following training. German children were more strategic than American children. Instructed children performed better than control children. German parents reported more instruction of strategies in the home. These data suggest that formal education is responsible for aspects of cognitive development that have sometimes been viewed as a function of age.
The goal of the present study was to determine whether 4- and 5-year-old kindergarten children could be trained to maintain an organizational strategy over 2- and 8 week periods through an elaborate training program. A second goal was to assess the effects of the training program on strategy awareness. Twenty-eight kindergarten children were pretested on two sort-recall tasks and their awareness of the use of the clustering strategy was assessed through a protocol type procedure. Half the children received seven half-hour sessions of individual training in the clustering strategy and half the children participated in a control group. Both groups were post-tested on two sort-recall tasks 2 weeks following training and again 8 weeks following training. Strategy awareness, as measured by verbal protocol, was assessed at both post-test points. The elaborate strategy training program was successful in inducing short- and long-term strategy maintenance of the clustering strategy. Trained children’s clustering during sorting and clustering during recall was consistently related to the amount of items correctly recalled. No differences in strategy awareness were found. These findings demonstrate that the elaborate training procedure used in this study can be a very effective memory technique for young kindergarten children.
In a study intended to replicate and extend the findings from a recent experiment by Schneider and Bjorklund (1992), the expert/novice paradigm was used with second- and fourth-grade children in a sort/recall task. Children were classified as experts or novices for their knowledge of baseball, then given two sort/recall tasks, with a list consisting of either baseball or nonbaseball terms. Experts recalled more than novices on the baseball list only. While both groups used organizational strategies at sorting on the nonbaseball list, experts were marginally more strategic than novices on the baseball list, and no differences were found between the groups on either list for clustering. Baseball experts used more adultlike categories, suggesting that their enhanced levels of recall were attributed in part to strategy use, although there was also evidence that most of the substantial recall difference between the groups was attributed to item-specific effects associated with a more elaborated knowledge base. A second experiment using fifth-grade children on a multitrial sort/recall task using the baseball list also found increased recall by experts, and also found evidence of strategic behavior at the sort phase for trials 3 and 4.
Previous research has shown German children to be more strategic on sort-recall memory tasks than their American age-mates, and to show fewer effort-related attributions. We conducted this study to determine if those differences are due to systematic differences in the strategy instruction and attributional beliefs of German and U.S. teachers, and to explore metacognitive instructional practices in the two countries. Teachers responded to a questionnaire that inquired about their use of strategy instructions, fostering of reflective thinking in pupils, sources of children’s learning problems, and modeling of metacognitive skills such as monitoring. The second part of the questionnaire asked about the reasons underlying children’s academic successes and failures. German teachers reported more instruction of task-specific strategies, while American teachers showed more effort-related attributions. The types of strategies instructed and types of learning problems most frequently described varied across the two countries, and also according to how many years the teachers had taught. Results were discussed regarding their implications for metacognitive developmental theory, particularly regarding culture and other environmental influences on the development of controlled processing.
This project had two goals: (1) to examine the impact of strategy training on memory performance in German and American children, and (2) to search for environmental correlates of individual differences in cognitive processes. Following pretesting, 437 children were divided into training and control groups, with the former receiving training in clustering strategies. Trained children showed sizable strategy maintenance and transfer effects two weeks and six months later. Parents and teachers completed questionnaires about the teaching of strategies and their attributional beliefs about children's academic successes and failures. The differences in strategie behavior and attributions of German and American children were due, in part, to differences in strategy-enriched environments.
The nature of good information processing is outlined as determined by intact neurology, information stored in long-term memory, and general cognitive tendencies, attitudes, and styles. Educators can promote the development of good information processing by promoting what is in long-term memory. This can be accomplished by teaching important literary, scientific, and cultural knowledge; teaching strategies; motivating the acquisition and use of important conceptual knowledge and strategies; and encouraging the general tendencies supporting good information processing. Good information processing can be produced by years of appropriate educational input. Good information processors cannot be produced by short-term interventions.
Nine hierarchical and four nonhierarchical clustering algorithms were compared on their ability to resolve 200 multivariate normal mixtures. The effects of coverage, similarity measures, and cluster overlap were studied by including different levels of coverage for the hierarchical algorithms, Euclidean distances and Pearson correlation coefficients, and truncated multivariate normal mixtures in the analysis. The results confirmed the findings of previous Monte Carlo studies on clustering procedures in that accuracy was inversely related to coverage, and that algorithms using correlation as the similarity measure were significantly more accurate than those using Euclidean distances. No evidence was found for the assumption that the positive effects of the use of correlation coefficients are confined to unconstrained mixture models.
The present study investigated the relationshtp between developmental shifts in the organization of materials and developmental changes in deliberate strategy use. Second and fourth grade children were presented with clusterable sort/recall lists representing the factorial combinations of high and low interitem association, and high and low category relatedness. Strategy use in the task was rated by the experimenter and also assessed via self reports. General and task-related strategy knowledge tmetamemoryt was also examined. Second graders displayed more category clustering during recall for highly associated items than for weakly associated items. whereas older children’s recall organization (but not recall) was unaffected by this organizational dimension. Correlations among measures of metamemory and organizational behavior indicated that second graders in general were unaware of the importance of categorization strategies for facilitation of recall. On the other hand. sorting during study and task-related metamemory were the most important predictors of fourth graders’ recall performance, thus indicating that most fourth graders used categorization strategies deliberately.
Second- and fourth-grade children were classified according to their knowledge of soccer (experts vs. novices) and IQ (high vs. low), and given 2 sort-recall tasks. One task included items related to the game of soccer and the other included items from familiar natural language categories. Previous research has shown that expertise in a snbject can compensate for low levels of performance on text comprehension tasks. Our results, the flrst examing the effects of both expertise and intelligence on a strategic memory task, were that soccer expert children recalled more items on the soccer list bnt not on the nonsoccer list than soccer novice children. However, soccer expertise did not modify a significant effect of IQ level, with high-IQ children recalling more than low-IQ children for all contrasts. Interest in soccer was found to be related to expertise but did not contribute to differences in memory performance. The results demonstrate that the knowledge base plays an important role in children's memory, but that domain knowledge cannot fully eliminate the effects of IQ on sort-recall tasks using domain-related materials. That is, although rich domain knowledge seemed to compensate for low aptitude, in that low-aptitude experts performed at the level of high-aptitude novices, its effects were not strong enough to eliminate performance differences between highand low-aptitude soccer experts.