Assignment: Memory Development

Assignment: Memory Development

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As the ability to sustain attention grows, memory also improves. The implementation of memory strategies increases a child’s likelihood of transferring information from the working memory to the long-term memory. There are three strategies that enhance memory in order to capture and retain new information: rehearsal, organization, and elaboration.

If you need to remember a phone number, you may repeat the sequence of numbers to yourself. This is a memory strategy known as rehearsal. If you need to remember a list of items to buy at the store, you may group related items (e.g. all dairy products together), which is a strategy called organization. While both strategies will help hold the information in your working memory, they need time and practice to perfect. When children learn to use several strategies at once, they increase their chances of remembering. By the end of middle childhood, children begin to utilize another strategy known as elaboration. This is when they establish a relationship between or among pieces of information that do not obviously belong in the same category. In other words, they make meaning out of something that is not meaningful. For example, remembering a locker combination by associating the numbers with the numbers on sports jerseys. This sophisticated memory strategy becomes more common during adolescence.

Once you have done the work of transferring information from your working memory to your long-term memory, to use it again, you have to go through the process of retrieval. Retrieval of information from our long-term knowledge base occurs in three ways: recognition, recall, and reconstruction.

RECOGNITION
RECALL
RECONSTRUCTION
OTHER TYPES OF MEMORY INCLUDE:
FUZZY-TRACE THEORY
SEMANTIC MEMORY
EPISODIC MEMORY
Metacognition
Metacognition is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought. This is another form of knowledge that may influence how well children remember and solve problems. This awareness significantly increases in early and middle childhood as children build a naïve theory of mind, or a coherent understanding of people as mental beings. They begin to develop the ability to interpret their own mental and emotional states (e.g., perceptions, feelings, desires, beliefs), as well as those of others. This understanding is revised as they encounter new facts.

As children learn what it means to be effective thinkers, they begin to directly examine their cognitive processes. In other words, they think about their thinking. This is known as metacognition. When children meet mental challenges, they use what they know about thinking strategies to reach their goals. For example, after reading a confusing scientific article, the child may decide to slowly reread it, underlining key terms and details to aid memory and comprehension. Although this ability to apply metacognitive strategies increases with age, this is not a skill that is easily mastered in school-age children or adolescents. Though they may understand the importance of utilizing metacognitive strategies, they may still require practice in applying cognitive self-regulation, or the process of continuously monitoring and controlling progress toward a goal—planning, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts. Parents and teachers play critical roles in helping advance a child’s self-regulation skills by pointing out important elements of a task and proposing strategies to approach problems and self-monitor performance. In addition, explaining to children why certain strategies are more effective than others prompts them to utilize those strategies in the future.