Locus of control and depth of processing in children

A children's locus of control (LOC) measure was administered to 153 sixth-grade students who were subsequently assigned to one of four processing conditions. Groups were instructed to encode a word list semantically, acoustically, orthographically, or any way the S wished and to retain them for a later recognition test. Criterion variables included total number of words correctly recognized as well as four varieties of distractor choices. Support was provided for the contention that externals tend to encode stimuli in more superficial ways than do internals, although the amount of variance in recognition memory accounted for by the LOC measure was small. Encoding conditions had a marked effect on retention, and false distractor choices appeared to reflect the level at which stimulus words were encoded.