Robert E. Guttentag - US grants

The acquisition of skill at memorizing and recalling information is of critical importance for children's academic success. Research on memory development has demonstrated that age differences in memory ability reflect, in part, age differences in mnemonic strategy use; older children tend to use a greater number of, and more effective, mnemonic strategies than do younger children. An assumption present in much of this research has been that age differences in strategy use reflect age differences in strategy propensity, that is, in the general tendency to utilize a particular strategy to achieve memorization goals. Strategy use, however, necessarily involves some form of interaction between factors internal to the memorizer (including the content and structure of the memorizer's semantic memory) and characteristics of the task at hand (including the exact nature of the to-be-memorized materials). Gaining insight into the nature of this interaction is critical for understanding children's strategy selection, for understanding the factors responsible for age differences in strategy use, and for understanding the process of strategy acquisition. The experiments proposed here focus on children's use of elaboration strategies on associative learning tasks. Recent evidence has found that children's associative learning performance is superior when materials are presented for which elaborative associations are likely to be readily accessible from semantic memory (e.g., learning the word pair "pail- beach"). These findings raise a number of important, but as yet unaddressed, issues. The first issue is whether children utilize elaborative strategies at earlier ages with materials for which elaborations are readily accessible than with less accessible materials. A second issue concerns the possibility that experience with readily accessible materials (which may automatically elicit elaborative procedures) may play an important role in children's initial discovery of the efficacy of elaboration strategies. Finally, these findings raise the possibility that age differences in associative learning and elaboration strategy use may result, in part, from age differences in accessibility to the semantic information required to generate an elaborative association. The research proposed here will address each of these important questions.