Preschoolers' and Third Graders' Sorting Preferences and Strategic Knowledge of Taxonomic Associative and Perceptual Organizational Strategies

This study investigated strategic use and metamemory concerning taxonomic, associative, and perceptual organizational strategies. Preschool and third grade children were asked to sort stimuli which varied orthogonally along three dimensions; taxonomically, associatively, and perceptually. Free recall was assessed. Each child also completed one of two metamemory tasks; a paired comparison or a peer teaching task. The order of the memory/metamemory tasks was counterbalanced within age groups. The results showed that older children sorted by taxonomic and associative attributes while younger children exhibited no sorting preference. Older children recalled significantly more pictures, although no significant age differences in recall clustering were found. Third graders judged the associative strategy as more effective than sorting taxonomically, whereas younger children did not discriminate among any of the organizational strategies. In the peer teaching conditions, third graders provided significantly more taxonomic and assoc1ative examples than preschoolers. The two metamemory tasks affected subsequent sorting preferences differently with those performing the pa1red comparison task sorting significantly more by color, while subjects who did the peer teaching task sorted by associative criteria. Finally, encoding by taxonomic and associat1ve criteria was found to be related to taxonomic and associat1ve recall clustering scores. Sorting by association, and associative clustering scores were related to the number of associative examples provided during peer teaching. The implicat1ons of the peer teaching task as a relatively new method of metamemory assessment are discussed.