Developmental changes in knowledge about different retrieval problems

Conducted 2 experiments to examine developmental changes from middle childhood to adolescence in metaretrieval plans offered to solve different retrieval problems. In each experiment, 80 children in Grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 made judgments about 2 problems that were more or less external or internal . The spontaneous responses from Exp I revealed an age increase in the number of different ideas generated for the internal problem and an age increase in the number of children who recommended the highly general strategy of retracing one's steps for retrieval. The forced-choice judgments in Exp II revealed the perception that the internal problem is more difficult than the external one and some discrepancy between the "best" strategy most often chosen for each retrieval problem (Exp II) and the strategy most frequently mentioned (Exp I). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).