A multi-method perspective on children's use of rehearsal in serial recall tasks

Project Information

MMPCURSRT

Grant agreement ID: 707141

DOI

10.3030/707141

Project closed

EC signature date 7 March 2016

Start date 1 October 2016

End date 30 September 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 183 454,80

EU contribution

€ 183 454,80

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MMPCURSRT (A multi-method perspective on children's use of rehearsal in serial recall tasks)

Reporting period: 2016-10-01 to 2018-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In a changing society, schools not only have the task of teaching knowledge, but also have to prepare students for life-long learning. Therefore, education increasingly aims to foster Self-Regulated Learning. For self-regulated learning students need various competencies: a large set of strategies appropriate for different cognitive tasks, metacognition to regulate the targeted use of appropriate strategies as well as motivation and volition to stay engaged in the learning tasks.
Even though research into self-regulated learning has grown in the last 25 years, several key issues have not been solved yet. However, these can be studied by combining methods from cognitive and from developmental psychology with state-of-the-art statistical modelling. One issue is that high-quality multi-method research into strategy development and metacognitive development is very scarce, particular in the elementary school years.
From a scientific perspective this research is crucial, because all methods to assess cognitive strategies have their specific strengths and weaknesses. Only if different methods lead to the same or similar conclusions can we gain reliable, cross-validated knowledge about strategy use and development. Only with multi-method research can we learn how well children’s metacognitive skills to accurately report their cognitive strategy have developed. In addition to children’s self-reports about strategy use, we therefore need further methods to check the accuracy of these self-reports.
From a societal perspective this research is crucial, because the competencies for self-regulated learning are starting to develop throughout the primary school years. Teachers trying to foster self-regulated learning in their day-to-day work, as well as researchers developing interventions, need reliable knowledge about strategies and metacognitive development.
The present project therefore examined questions of the development of strategy use, strategy adaptation to task characteristics and metacognitive insights into strategy use within the area of memory strategies.
The objectives of the project were to move research into strategy development and metacognitive development forward by
(a) gathering high-quality data in an experimentally well controlled manner by using individualized testing
(b) … with an integrated multi-method design to combine data from complementary sources
(c) … in a sample large enough to provide good statistical power
(d) and to analyse the data with novel statistical modelling techniques that are most appropriate for the data structure and the research questions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

From February 2017 until March 2018, about 200 children between the age of 6 and 11 years participated in the project. Children were tested during three one-on-one sessions in a mobile lab brought to their schools.
We used four complementary methods to assess strategy use:
1) picture-supported self-reports (asking children to indicate a strategy after each trial of some of the memory tasks)
2) think-aloud protocols (asking children to verbalize all thoughts during some of the memory tasks)
3) self-presentation times of memory items (as certain time patterns should be related to certain strategies)
4) systematic observations of overt strategic behaviour.

Figure 1: Illustrations used to first explain memory strategies and to then ask for strategy self-reports after each memory trial in the self-report condition
[Insert attached picture here]

The main results so far are that analyses of self-reports, think-aloud protocols and self-presentation times lead to convergent conclusions. This means that we can trust the results as reflecting strategy development.
Most children of all ages did use various strategies instead of relying on just one. In the youngest group, just listening to the words, which is not a particularly sophisticated strategy, was the most prevalent approach. Relying on listening decreased with age, while cumulative rehearsal increased. Additionally, between the age of 8 to 11 years, children got better at adapting their strategy choice to task difficulty. Older children were more likely to use sophisticated, but more time-consuming cumulative rehearsal for harder tasks with more words to remember, while using listening or single rehearsal for easier tasks that they could remember with these faster strategies.
Work with adults and cognitive modelling of memory processes done by other labs (not this project) calls into questions whether cumulative rehearsal really improves recall. In contrast, our results indicate that children mostly benefit from choosing cumulative rehearsal.
The convergent results from self-reports, think-aloud protocols and self-presentation times analysed at a group level indicate that many children can report their cognitive strategies in a sufficiently accurate manner. So metacognitive accuracy seems to be good in general. However, these analyses and results cannot tell us how well metacognitive accuracy is developed in each child. We have therefore developed an innovative approach to tackle this problem by designing a cognitive Bayesian model that can integrate the information from picture-supported self-reports, self-presentation times and systematic observations and makes predictions about children’s actual, non-observable strategy use and their metacognitive accuracy. We have to test this model further before reporting results and running further analyses on metacognitive development.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The impact of the project will be at the intersection of Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology and Education. The contributions are in 3 areas: firstly, the project generated easily-interpretable consistent results about children’s development of memory strategies; secondly, this multi-method project helps to understand how the used methods work with children and provides empirical evidence of the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods; thirdly, it introduced several innovative statistical modelling techniques. Cross-classified multilevel models are becoming the state-of-the-art standard in some areas of Psychology and Education, but to our knowledge have not been used in strategy research even though they are a very appropriate tool to model between-person and within-person variability in strategy use. To answer some of our research questions we also applied even more sophisticated methods that go beyond typical multilevel approaches.
We do not see an immediate, direct impact on society of this single basic research project with 2-year funding for one research fellow. However, the cumulative research output of other projects that will draw on the output generated by the current project (content knowledge, assessment tools and/or the statistical modelling techniques) will improve our knowledge of strategy development and metacognitive development and is likely to have implications for how students are best supported to become self-regulated learners.

Figure 1