Differences in Long-Term Retention in Relation to Early School Achievement

Abstract

On two widely separated occasions (referred to as Experiments 1 and 2), children in grades 2 and 3 were given three study-recall trials on a list of familiar words, with a retention test 24 hr. later. Percentage retained, a measure that was independent of original scores, showed significant stability over the two occasions, indicating the existence of individual differences in rates of forgetting. Further evidence of such differences accrued from group differences found within each experiment; children judged by teachers to forget unusually rapidly did display more rapid forgetting than did unselected children. However, children labeled learning disabled by the schools failed to display unusually rapid forgetting, despite common proposals to the contrary. An encoding deficit hypothesis was proposed to account for unusually rapid forgetting, and issues regarding the measurement of individual differences in forgetting were addressed.