Strategic and nonstrategic factors in gifted children's free recall

Abstract

The present experiment contrasted the recall of gifted and nongifted middle-school children for sets of categorically related items. Subjects were given a single free-recall trial on each of two lists consisting of category-typical and category-atypical words. The typicality of the items for one list was based on each subject's unique typicality ratings, whereas the typicality of the items in the second list was based on adult norms. A preliminary category-rating task indicated that gifted students were somewhat more similar to adults in their ratings of category typicality than nongifted children. Recall was comparable between the gifted and nongifted subjects for typical items, but greater for the gifted subjects for atypical items. The latency between the recall of unrelated words was faster for the gifted than the nongifted children. Subjects were classified as strategic or nonstrategic on the basis of clustering and interitem latencies. Gifted subjects were less apt to be classified as strategic than nongifted subjects on the typical items of the self-generated list; there were no differences in the classification between the gifted and nongifted children for all other contrasts. These results were interpreted as indicating that the cognitive advantage of gifted relative to nongifted children is more apt to be in terms of nonstrategic rather than strategic functioning.