Relating Children’s Early Elementary Classroom Experiences to Later Skilled Remembering and Study Skills

Abstract

As children transition from the early to later grades of elementary school, they become increasingly skilled at employing a variety of techniques – such as rehearsal and organizational strategies – for remembering information. Developmental changes in strategy use have been well documented, but little is known about the extent to which these “simple” techniques give way to more complex strategies, such as the study skills that are important in academically–based tasks in later elementary school. Moreover, although school experiences have been shown to be important in the development of young children’s deliberate memory skills, less is known about how the school context sets the stage for the use of more sophisticated strategies and study skills. In this article, we make use of data from a longitudinal study of children’s memory skills to describe associations among measures of children’s basic memory strategy use in the first and second grades and their implementation of more complex strategies and study skills in the fourth grade. We also highlight linkages between first-grade teachers’ use of “Cognitive Processing Language” (CPL) during instruction and children’s performance in the first, second, and fourth grades. This project reflects an ongoing collaboration among researchers, teachers, and school administrators, and we end with a discussion of the benefits – for both basic understanding and educational practice – that can result from such an endeavor.