No abstract

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.

No abstract

Test-retest reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity of a metamemory battery were assessed. Fifty-five second-graders were given an extensive metamemory battery on two occasions separated by a 6-week interval. Test-retest correlations ranged from .29 to .49 for individual subtests, with a correlation of .67 for the composite battery. The children were then given training on the use of an interrogative-elaboration strategy to aid paired associate learning. Following three training sessions, tests for strategy maintenance and generalization were administered. Correlations relating strategy use with metamemory were significant for the transfer tasks, even when general knowledge was partialled out. The concept of metamemory appears useful in explaining production deficiencies and insightful strategy invention in young children.Metamemory refers to self-knowledge about memory processes (Brown, 1978;Flavell & Wellman, 1977).Recent studies have examined the construct validity of metamemory in terms of its relationship to a variety of strategic behaviors Kendall, Borkowski, & Cavanaugh, 1980; Beuhring, Note 1). While significant correlations between memory knowledge and memory processes or recall accuracy have been found, the modest size of these relationships is not strongly supportive of extant metamemory theory. The low to moderate correlations may be due as much to weaknesses in the instruments measuring meta· memory as to the theoretical invalidity of the concept . The present studies attempted to measure the testretest reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity of a new metamemory battery. In Experiment 1, 55 second-graders were given a seven-item metamemory battery on two occasions, with testing sessions separated by a 6-week interval. The metamemory test was composed of four items from the Kreutzer, Leonard, and Flavell (1975) scale, a memory monitoring task (Levin, Yussen, DeRose, & Pressley, 1977), and two new sub tests assessing children's knowledge about input/output processing strategies. Experi- ment 2 examined the role of metamemorial knowledge as a predictor of strategy transfer. That is, the secondgraders, used originally to determine reliability, were trained on a four-step interrogative-elaboration strategy as an aid to paired associate learning. The elaboration strategy was not explicitly associated with any of the metamemory subtests. Kestner and Borkowski (1979) employed similar task and training procedures and found recall to be significantly related to the quantity and quality of elaborations used at transfer.Borkowski (in press) has argued that metamemory/ strategy-use relationships will be found only in limited contexts, such as on novel tasks or transfer tests. We hypothesized that metamemory, as indexed by our battery, would predict strategic behavior on paired associate tasks following the training of the elaboration strategy and would show stronger relationships than a measure of general intelligence. That is, young children given prolonged, thorough strategy...

No abstract