Content Knowledge: Its Role, Representation, and Restructuring in Memory Development

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter provides a knowledge-based framework that could be useful in interpreting much of the memory development literature of the 1970s and 1980s. The resulting framework was largely composed of a scaffolding of content knowledge of various types. It argues that most of the age differences that were observed in previous studies could be explained in terms of the ways in which content knowledge developed. Thus, the chapter focuses on a reanalysis of these studies almost exclusively in the context of age-related differences in content knowledge. A danger in this approach is that it may create the impression that changes in content knowledge are the sole source of knowledge-based developmental differences in memory. Many other types of knowledge also change: planning knowledge, “meta” knowledge, and procedural skills.