Knowledge accessibility, achievement goals, and memory strategy maintenance

An important aim of educational psychology is to account for the difficulties in cognitive strategy maintenance. Possible explanations may be found in developmental studies concerning the interdependence of knowledge accessibility and strategy use, and in current achievement goal models which assume that individuals with a learning goal use deeper strategies than those with a performance goal.

The purpose of this study was to examine how knowledge accessibility and achievement goals separately or conjointly affect the maintenance of a categorization strategy, recall performance, and perception of the strategy (utility, difficulty, effort) in a free recall task.

Participants were 93 first-year students from a human science university in France.

In the first phase, the students were taught how to use a categorization strategy in a recall task involving highly accessible (typical) items. In a subsequent transfer task, the same students were assigned to one of four experimental conditions where they were asked to recall a typical or atypical list and where a learning or performance goal was induced.

Analysis showed that whatever the typicality of the list, a learning goal promoted maintenance of the categorization strategy, and of perception of its utility. Performance goal participants only maintained this strategy and its perceptions on typical lists, while on atypical lists they display less clustering and found the strategy less useful.

Results suggest that maintenance of a cognitive strategy is facilitated when there is compatibility between a performance goal and the task demands, or when the participants are learning-goal oriented.