Relationships between recall, organizational strategy, and metamemory in young children

아동의 회상수행, 조직화 책략 및 상위기억간의 관계

The purpose of the present research was to study developmental trends in and relationships between recall, organizational strategy, and metamemory in young children. The subjects were 84 children, 14 boys and 14 girls at each age level, 4, 6, and 8. Two tasks (memory task & metamemory task) were used to assess children's recall, organizational strategy, and metamemory based on Sodian et al.(1986). All subjects were randomly assigned either to the play-and-remember condition or to the sort-and-remember condition. The two tasks were administered to children individually with the memory task followed by the metamemory task. The data were analysed by the statistical methods of two-way ANOVA, Student-Newman-Keuls post hoc test, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test, Pearson's correlation coefficient and Kendall's Tau. Children's recall (free, conceptually-cued, and perceptually-cued) level increased with age. There were significant experimental condition differences in free recall and conceptually-cued recall, but not in perceptually-cued recall. Children's organizational strategy showed differential developmental trends by experimental condition. Use of conceptual strategy at both encoding and retrieval increased with age in both experimental conditions. Use of perceptual strategy (PS) at encoding showed an inverted-U age effect in the play-and-remember condition, but PS decreased linearly with age in the sort-and-remember condition. There were significant age differences in metamemory, and there were significant correlations between recall and organizational strategy.