Fourier analyses of children's behaviors were conducted over a sequence of five consecutive study/recall trials to identify temporal patterns. Findings pointed to a global strategy in which children learn the items' categories before learning them individually. There was little qualitative difference in temporal organization for second graders and…

Examined whether preschool children focus on a small number of attributes or attend to whole exemplars in learning basic categories for fictitious animals. Found little evidence that children employed rules, but found strong evidence that children encoded exemplars as integrated wholes during category training. Discusses implications for theories…

Examined whether a sample of variability measures could be reduced to a smaller number of factors with 8 independent samples of second through fourth graders and adults. Found that a 2-factor model of strategy diversity and strategy change was supported for all samples. Strategy diversity positively related to children's recall; strategy change…

Applies to the inclined-plane task Siegler's (1981) observation that performance on Piagetian tasks is governed by similar rule structures. Also replicates Siegler's original observations about the development on the balance-scale task and determines the consistency in children's rule usage across tasks. (Author/AS)

Examined the benefits of a peer collaborative activity on cognitive strategy use and effectiveness and on metacognitive understanding of strategy use. Found that interaction with children working at a higher level of metacognitive knowledge increased strategy use and induced higher levels of metacognitive thinking. Use of sorting strategy and…

In three experiments, three normal preschoolers were presented with sorting tasks ordinarily insoluble for four-year-olds. Found that, although the subjects had difficulty correctly sorting the pictures when told what criterion to sort by, they could provide correct answers when asked what they were looking for. This self-instructional effect was…

When taught to link sorting to self-instruction ("I'm looking for blue triangles") children show perfect accuracy in sorting. This study investigated if this performance would generalize to new stimuli. One participant showed near-perfect generalization to all new stimulus sets (shapes, letters, pictures); two had difficulty with…

Tested 32 4-year-olds and 32 6-year-olds for free and cued recall following either play-and-remember or sort-and-remember instructions and assessed them for their metamemory of the efficacy of conceptual and perceptual sorting strategies. Younger children recalled more items under sort-and-remember, whereas no recall differences were found for the…

Investigated 48 preschool, kindergarten, and first grade children's use of perceptual and taxonomic memory organization strategies. Addressed age differences in qualities, coordination, and effectiveness of study and retrieval organization strategies, and age and individual differences in relationships between memory knowledge and strategy use.…

Recall of "to-be-remembered items" benefited from schematically related, superordinate, and slot filler cues, but not coordinate cues. The relative strength of different relationships does not appear to change with age. Findings are consistent with the view that lexical memory is schematically and taxonomically organized from early…