The ability to effectively memorize and recall information presented by others is an important developmental achievement for children's school success. Research on children's memory development has demonstrated several reliable findings: (1) that the development of memory proficiency in childhood can be attributed largely to the emergence and refinement of strategic memory skills; (2) that strategy usage in deliberate memory tasks for verbal materials first appears during the school years, and is not evident in children younger that 7 years; (3) that younger children improve their recall performance when instructed to use a strategy, but fail to use the strategy after instruction. Children's failures to use memory strategies after training have led some researchers to assume that young children are unable to transfer strategies flexibly across tasks and stimulus domains, and therefore, are unable to benefit from strategy instruction. Others view the problem as an """"""""instructional deficiency,"""""""" suggesting that the training procedures used to date have not included the metacognitive and motivational elements necessary to influence post-training behaviors of young children. Presently, we know little about young children's abilities to transfer pre- existing knowledge and skills across tasks and stimulus domains, or about how they profit from practice and instruction. The proposed research is designed to study the transfer propensities of very young children, first, by examining the effects of a highly embellished training procedure on preschool children's transfer of an organizational memory strategy to a new stimulus medium (Experiment 1), second, by attempting to identify components of training that are more and less essential for strategy transfer (Experiment 2), and third, by examining individual differences in the preschool children's verbal ability, strategy knowledge, conceptual tempo, and mastery motivation as they relate to transfer performance (Experiment 3).
