CATEGORICAL ORGANIZATION AND CUMULATIVE REHEARSAL - ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SIMULTANEOUS USE OF 2 MEMORY STRATEGIES

At the age of nine or ten years, the deliberate use of cumulative rehearsal and categorical organization become part of children's memory capabilities. Developmental relationships in the usage and in the metamnemonic causes of both strategies were analyzed. To do this, the typical sort-recall procedure traditionally used to study organizational strategies was modified in a way that allows the assessment of additional cumulative rehearsal activities during the learning of the items to be remembered. 161 children from grades 2, 3, 4, and 6 were tested individually. In addition, children's metamemory about cumulative rehearsal and categorical organization was assessed. In this task, the use of category organization proved to be more powerful with regard to recall performance than cumulative rehearsal. As a function of children's strategy-specific metamemory, some of them simultaneously used both strategies. Only among grade 6 children did this convergence lead to better recall performance compared to the sole use of the organizational strategy.