The Locus of Organization Failures in Children's Recall

Memory Development Between 2 and 20

“…The other involved failures during the retrieval phase to make use of groupings that were constructed at encoding. Lange's own work (Lange & Griffith, 1977) favored the former interpretation, since he obtained strong covariation between children's input organization and their recall.…”

“…These failures were followed by studies in which children were prompted to make use of potential organizational features through directions to sort to-be-leamed materials into meaningful groups. In general, when children were asked to sort a list several times, the items were sorted into stable groups after a few trials-that is, sorting became consistent from trial to trial, with these sorts generally (although not perfectly) consistent with the categorical structures of the lists (Lange & Griffith, 1977;Lange & Jackson, 1974;Worden, 1975). A main hypothesis in these studies was that these subject-determined sorts would positively affect recall of material.…”

“…Very salient prompts during encoding do seem to affect memory, however. Thus, requiring 4-to 5-year-o1ds to sort to-be-1eamed 1ists into semantic categories enhances memory ofthe material (e.g., Moe1y et al 1969;Lange & Griffith, 1977). These sort-recall resu1ts make clear that even very young children can be 1ed to emp1oy organizationa1 strategies profitab1y, a1though nonprompted, intentional use of such strategies has never been observed with 2-to 5-year-o1ds (Perlmutter & Myers, 1979).…”

“…A main hypothesis in these studies was that these subject-determined sorts would positively affect recall of material. Prompted sorting during study did in fact produce high dustering at output and improved recall (e.g., Lange & Griffith, 1977). In short, instructions to young grade-school children to sort during study seemed to overcome a production deficiency with respect to use of organizational information in lists (see also Black & Rollins, 1982;, Hagan, & Rollins, 1984;Moely et al, 1969;Schneider, 1985b;Schneider, Borkowski, Kurtz, & Kerwin, 1986).…”

Recall, clustering, and metamemory in young children

“…Only very few studies have investigated the effects of instructing preschool children to use an organizational strategy on their behavior and subsequent recall performance: in an early study, Moely, Olson, Halves, and Flavell (1969) found that 5-year-olds could be trained to arrange pictures into groups by taxonomic class membership and that this manipulation greatly improved their recall performance. Similarly, Lange and Griffith (1977) showed that 4&-year-olds' recall performance and clustering could be markedly increased by instructing them to organize items into groups and repeating this instruction over several trials until a stable organization had been reached.…”