Strategy utilization deficiencies in children: when, where, and why

By the early 1980s, a clear picture of the role of strategies in memory development was emerging. Strategies generally help recall and thus are a main contributor to memory development. Young children have a production deficiency that is overcome during the grade school years. By the early 1990s, the process appeared to be a good deal more complex. Although spontaneously produced strategies often help recall, they do not inevitably do so, especially among novice strategy producers--even when their strategy production appears proficient. In the 1980s and 1990s, a main theme of research on children's strategies of memory has been that children begin to use strategies earlier than previously thought. Researchers have identified rudimentary strategies of even 2- and 3-yr-olds. Our research suggests that we also need to take a careful look at the other end of the spectrum. A strategy may continue to develop well beyond the point at which an apparently full-blown strategy is produced. Producing a relevant strategy does not mark the end of strategy development. Rather, it marks the beginning of the development of a proficient, low-effort strategy that enhances recall. Even after a child spontaneously produces the strategy fully and consistently, the strategy gradually becomes less effortful to access and to execute and is integrated with other mnemonic strategies and activities. As a result, the strategy is increasingly likely to facilitate recall. Researchers need to conduct a fine-grained analysis of the actual implementation of a strategy--how the strategy of interest dovetails with a set of strategic, metamemorial, information-processing, and motor-control processes. The utilization deficiency phenomenon may challenge current conceptions of how and why skills develop. Why do children spontaneously use and continue to use a skill that helps them little or not at all? The usual assumption has been that children acquire and perfect skills because they have some benefit for them. This benefit is still true in the long run, but not the short run. The utilization deficiency, Bjorklund and Green's (1992) account of young children's overoptimism, and Siegler's (e.g., McGilly & Siegler, 1989) observation that children sometimes reject, at least temporarily, a strategy that helps them, describe behaviors that do not fit easily into current models of children as rational problem solvers. We need a different conceptualization of the course of strategy development and perhaps skill development more generally.