Children's Strategies for Gathering Information in Three Tasks

When Easy Comes Hard: The Development of Adaptive Strategy Selection

“…In contrast, younger children searched more often in order of display, making it difficult to focus their attention on the most relevant information. This finding supports the attention allocation hypothesis, which holds that young children have difficulties in selectively attending to the most relevant pieces of information (Davidson, 1991a, 1991b, 1996; Miller, Haynes, DeMarie‐Dreblow, & Woody‐Ramsey, 1986; Turner & Bentley, 1982). The ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information seems to develop throughout adolescence and may have significant real‐world consequences.…”

Cluster Analysis in Neuropsychological Research

“…The improvement in long-term verbal memory observed between 5 and 12 years of age corresponds with the time, which most children attend elementary and middle school, and is likely infl uenced by cognitive and environmental factors within the classroom including acquired memory strategies (Miller, Haynes, DeMarie-Dreblow, & Woody-Ramsey, 1986 ). Memory capacity, knowledge base, and metamemory in particular have been implicated as critical factors in the use of long-term verbal memory strategies in the school environment, and children under 8 years of age have fewer cognitive resources to use these strategies effectively (Kron-Sperl, Schneider, & Hasselhorn, 2008 ).…”

Learning for the future: children’s capacity to acquire information and skills in preparation for a future event

“…In fact, to my knowledge, no published study has yet directly examined children's capacity to do so. However, one line of research that may offer insight into children's futureoriented information seeking is Miller and her colleagues' work on children's strategic information gathering (Miller, Haynes, DeMarie-Dreblow, & Woody-Ramsey, 1986;Miller, Seier, Probert, & Aloise, 1991;Miller & Weiss, 1981;Woody-Ramsey & Miller, 1988). The researchers developed a selective attention task in which children were required to memorise the location of certain items hidden beneath doors for later recall in a future test.…”

“…Miller and her colleagues' studies (Miller et al, 1986;Miller et al, 1991;Miller & Weiss, 1981;Woody-Ramsey & Miller, 1988), however, were aimed at examining children's selective attention rather than directly studying their future-directed information seeking. Therefore, in their task, preschoolers were explicitly told which information they needed to remember for the test.…”

“…The aim of Study 1 (presented in Chapter 2) was to examine 4-to 7-year-olds' capacity to spontaneously seek information needed for a future event. In this study, I presented children with a modified version of the selective attention task used in the research undertaken by Miller and colleagues' (Miller et al, 1986;Miller et al, 1991;Miller & Weiss, 1981;Woody-Ramsey & Miller, 1988) on children's strategic information gathering. In this modified version, rather than telling children which information they needed to memorise, I highlighted select information as having a future purpose and instead allowed children to decide for themselves which information to spend time learning.…”