Spontaneous Allocation of Study Time by First- and Third-Grade Children in a Simple Memory Task

Two aspects of study time allocation were examined in first- and third-grade children: allocating more time to more difficult material (differential allocation) and allocating sufficient time to meet the study goal (sufficient allocation). We asked children to study names of familiar and unfamiliar objects until they were sure they could name all the items correctly. Each object was depicted on a separate card affixed with a strip of recording tape. By running the card through a Language Master machine, the children could learn the name of the object on the card. Both first- and third-grade children spontaneously spent more time studying the names of the objects that they initially did not know in the hard-task category, (e.g., anvil, torii) than they spent studying the names of the objects in the easy-task category (e.g., apple, frog). More of the older children used a self-testing strategy to assess the progress of learning than did the younger children. Many of the self-testing users at the third-grade level, however, had difficulty in assessing whether or not they had studied sufficiently.