Recall, clustering, and metamemory in young children

Abstract

Thirty-two 4-year-olds and thirty-two 6-year-olds were tested for free and cued recall following either play-and-remember or sort-and-remember instructions and assessed for their metamemory of the efficacy of conceptual and perceptual sorting strategies. The younger children recalled significantly more items under sort-and-remember than under play-and-remember instructions, whereas no significant recall differences between instructional conditions were found for the older children. However, 6-year-olds showed higher levels of recall than 4-yearolds in both instructional conditions. Category cues were much more effective than color cues, regardless of age. In addition, clustering scores indicated that conceptual organization at both encoding and retrieval increased with age and with instruction. These results show that from 4 to 6 years of age children are learning to spontaneously employ memory strategies. In addition, they highlight the increasing importance of conceptual organization to retention of young children. Finally, the metamemory data suggest that there may be a lag between children's articulated declarative knowledge about the usefulness of conceptual organization and their procedural use of it. 0 1986 Academic press, Inc.Memory development in school children has been studied extensively since the 1960s. Until recently much less attention has been given to the development of memory capabilities prior to school. Preschool children's encoding and retention abilities were traditionally characterized as quite deficient. Recent research has shown, however, that very young children perform remarkably well in quasi-naturalistic memory tasks (e.g

Long-term maintenance of organizational strategies in kindergarten children

“…(1986) reported significant levels of clustering during sorting as well as high levels of clustering during recall for the children in the sortand-remember condition who were instructed to put all those items together that go together. The discrepancy between our findings and those obtained by Sodian et al (1986) may be due to the fact that our instruction at pretest did not include any sorting cue; children were simply encouraged to do something with the items. Our results confirm those reported by Moely et al (1969) and provide further evidence for the production deficiency hypothesis proposed by these authors.…”

“…This finding is at odds with the results of an experimental study by Sodian, Schneider, and Perlmutter (1986) who compared the effects of a "play-and-remember" and a "sort-and-remember" instruction on 4-and 6-year-old's performances in a sort-recall task. Sodian el al.…”

Maternal provision of structure in a deliberate memory task in relation to their preschool children’s recall

“…For example, those 4-year-old children who received explicit instruction "to put those toys together that go together" before a study period recalled significantly more to-be-remembered objects than children who were in a play-in-remember condition (Sodian, et al, 1986). Moreover, it has been also found that providing category cues at the time of retrieval improves children's recall performance substantially (Kobasigawa, 1974;Sodian, et al, 1986). Therefore, it was not surprising that maternal emphasis on categorical relations among items both at the time of encoding and later at retrieval was positively related to children's recall.…”

“…For example, Rogoff, Ellis, and Gardner (1999) The task we selected was sort-recall: the stimuli were three categories of four related items (e.g., clothing, fruits, places). In previous research on strategic behavior and recall during free recall or sort-recall tasks, preschool children have often been presented with small attractive objects as the to-be-remembered stimuli (e.g., Baker-Ward et al, 1984;Perlmutter & Myers, 1979;Sodian et al, 1986). In the present study, rather than objects, we used black and white line drawings of objects, each presented on a separate card.…”

“…However, although young children do not demonstrate the variety of memory strategies that older children do, they are not completely incapable of such behavior. For example, preschoolers and elementary school-age children demonstrate strategic-looking behaviors during sort-recall and free-recall tasks when presented with highly associated items (e.g., Sodian, Schneider, & Perlmutter, 1986). Preschoolers have been observed to selectively attend to stimuli that they were asked to remember, to spontaneously name items, and to physically manipulate them (e.g., Baker-Ward, Ornstein, & Holden, 1984).…”