The role of children's expertise in a strategic memory task

Abstract

In a study intended to replicate and extend the findings from a recent experiment by Schneider and Bjorklund (1992), the expert/novice paradigm was used with second- and fourth-grade children in a sort/recall task. Children were classified as experts or novices for their knowledge of baseball, then given two sort/recall tasks, with a list consisting of either baseball or nonbaseball terms. Experts recalled more than novices on the baseball list only. While both groups used organizational strategies at sorting on the nonbaseball list, experts were marginally more strategic than novices on the baseball list, and no differences were found between the groups on either list for clustering. Baseball experts used more adultlike categories, suggesting that their enhanced levels of recall were attributed in part to strategy use, although there was also evidence that most of the substantial recall difference between the groups was attributed to item-specific effects associated with a more elaborated knowledge base. A second experiment using fifth-grade children on a multitrial sort/recall task using the baseball list also found increased recall by experts, and also found evidence of strategic behavior at the sort phase for trials 3 and 4.