INTRODUCTION. New Themes in Strategy Development. David F. Bjorklund. Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida 33431.
DEVELOPMENTAL REVIEW, ARTICLE NO.
17, 407–410 (1997)
DR970439
INTRODUCTION New Themes in Strategy Development David F. Bjorklund Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida 33431
and Patricia H. Miller Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611
Strategies have a long history in cognitive development, and deservedly so. As usually conceived, strategies refer to effortful and goal-directed cognitive operations that are controllable and executed intentionally by the individual and are potentially available to consciousness (Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1990; Naus & Ornstein, 1983; Pressley & McCormick, 1995). Strategies are used to solve problems, specifically, problems that a person is consciously aware he or she must solve. As such, strategies lie at the heart of one of the major questions of cognitive development: How is it that children gain intentional control over their cognition and problem solving? We believe that, in one form or another, this question lies at the heart of most research in cognitive development. (The other major questions in cognitive development, we believe, concern the nature of representation and the mechanisms of developmental change. There is little in mainstream cognitive development research that is not concerned, in one way or another, with one or more of these three questions.) Contemporary research in strategy development can trace its origins to the cognitive revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, developmental psychologists were recognizing the limits of behaviorism and modifying the paradigm to explain what happens in a child’s mind between perceiving the stimuli and making their responses. The answer, they proposed, was covert verbal mediators. Older children generated them and young children did not, although young children could sometimes be prompted to produce them and improve their task performance in the process 407 0273-2297/97 $25.00
Copyright 1997 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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(production deficiencies). Pioneering research by John Flavell and his colleagues (e.g., Flavell, Beach, & Chinsky, 1966; Keeney, Cannizzo, & Flavell, 1967; Moely, Olson, Halwes, & Flavell, 1969) focused on the role of strategies, particularly rehearsal, on children’s memory performance. The modern era of memory development can be traced to Flavell’s early work on strategies with a cognitive slant, and the rest of cognitive development soon followed suit. Psychologists examined age differences in the strategies children used to solve a wide range of problems, including tasks of arithmetic, reasoning, reading, and selective attention, among others (see Bjorklund, 1990). For some research areas, such as memory (e.g., Schneider & Pressley, 1989) and arithmetic (e.g., Ashcraft, 1990), changes in strategies became the dominant explanation for changes in development. For the most part, strategies were seen as changing in effectiveness over development, as children replaced simple and inefficient strategies with more complex and efficient ones. Times change, however, and the perspective of strategies as the primary explanatory mechanisms for certain aspects of cognitive development came to be questioned. For example, the introduction of the cognitive-science perspective to cognitive development brought with it an emphasis on nonconscious processes. Much of what is important in cognitive development, including problem solving, is not highly effortful and is not available to self-awareness (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 1990). This perspective in no way eliminated the role that strategies play in children’s cognition, but it caused researchers to integrate deliberate, strategic processes with processes that may be executed relatively automatically and without conscious awareness. Perhaps more important were the findings coming from within the strategy development field that indicated that some aspects of the canonical viewpoint of strategy development were not consistently supported by research evidence. For example, the belief that preschool children are essentially astrategic in their approach to problems was shown to be untrue (e.g., Wellman, 1988). Also, strategies do not always improve children’s performance, and sometimes even hinder it, a phenomenon Miller (1990) labeled utilization deficiency. And the view that children switch from using ineffective to more effective strategies was shown to be overly simplistic. Rather, children have a variety of strategies available to them at any one time, with inefficient strategies coexisting and competing for use with efficient ones for a long period of time (e.g., Siegler, 1987). Methods of studying strategy development have also changed. Longitudinal data have long been lacking in the study of strategy development, but at least one large-scale project has presented such data, which both confirms and questions some of the interpretations obtained from cross-sectional research (see Schneider & Sodian, this issue). More plentiful (and practical) are microgenetic studies, which assess changes in strategies on repeated testing sessions over relatively brief intervals (e.g., Siegler & Jenkins, 1989).
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New findings require new theories and new points of view. The papers in this special issue provide some of the new findings, new theories, and new perspectives that make the topic of strategy development a vibrant one—one that makes contact with three decades of previous research while embracing the new ideas from modern behavioral and cognitive science. Bjorklund, Miller, Coyle, and Slawinski extend the concept of utilization deficiency to training studies. They review over 20 years of memory training studies and demonstrate that utilization deficiencies—increases in strategy use without corresponding increases in memory performance—are a frequent phenomenon in training experiments. That the evidence has been unrecognized for years suggests that researchers’ belief in ubiquity of production deficiencies caused them to miss a seemingly obvious, important, and surprisingly common aspect of strategy development. Schneider and Sodian point out the implicit assumption of most researchers that findings from cross-sectional research accurately reflect intraindividual changes over time. In fact, if this were true, they state, there is little justification for conducting the more expensive longitudinal studies. They review the small data base of longitudinal studies of children’s memory strategies, focusing on the findings from the Munich Longitudinal Study. They find that, although the average age-related pattern of strategy changes is similar in longitudinal and cross-sectional samples, longitudinal studies indicate that there is much variability in changes of strategy use over time; they suggest that reliance on strictly cross-sectional studies may result in a misreading of developmental patterns and an overestimation of some phenomenon, such as utilization deficiencies. Crowley, Shrager, and Siegler present a new model of children’s strategy discovery and use, proposing that associative and metacognitive factors interact in a ‘‘competitive negotiation.’’ Their approach, derived from recent microgenetic studies of children’s acquisition of the min strategy, provides a better description of children’s strategy use than either metacognitive or associative models alone. The next step, they propose, is to construct a hybrid computer model that simulates the competitive negotiation approach. Computer simulation is also the focus of the paper by Bray, Reilly, Villa, and Grupe. Bray and his colleagues adopt a neural-network approach to simulation, in large part because of its relation to how the human brain functions. Rather than limiting themselves to the assessment of verbal strategies, as is typically the case in strategy development research, they examine developmental and individual differences in typical children and children with mental retardation on a series of location-memory tasks in which strategies are externalized. As will be seen, their simulations closely mirror actual performance and permit them to study specific mechanisms that have been hypothesized to affect children’s strategies but are only occasionally evaluated. These include novelty bias, inhibition of competing strategies, and context sensitivity. Like the models proposed by Crowley and his colleagues, the
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neural-network models of Bray et al. promise greater precision and specificity of psychological mechanisms than most contemporary approaches currently afford. In the final paper of this issue, Ellis adopts the strategy-choice model developed by Siegler and his colleagues, but views the model from a sociocultural perspective. What strategies children learn to use and how they use them varies as a function of cultural values as well as the more immediate social context. Psychologists’ traditional approach of looking at how children solve school-type problems ‘‘by themselves’’ provides a biased picture of strategy development in the everyday lives of children, and Ellis makes suggestions for new directions in research to rectify this bias. The papers constituting this special issue are a sampling of new research and ideas in the area of strategy development. The topic of children’s strategy development has not only a venerable history, but also a promising future. REFERENCES Ashcraft, M. H. (1990). Strategic processing in children’s mental arithmetic: A reivew and proposal. In D. F. Bjorklund (Ed.), Children’s strategies: Contemporary views of cognitive development (pp. 185–211). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Bjorklund, D. F. (Ed.) (1990). Children’s strategies: Contemporary views of cognitive development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (1990). Gist is the grist: Fuzzy-trace theory and the new intuitionism. Developmental Review, 10, 3–47. Flavell, J. H., Beach, D. R., & Chinsky, J. H. (1966). Spontaneous verbal rehearsal in a memory task as a function of age. Child Development, 37, 283–299. Harnishfeger, K. K., & Bjorklund, D. F. (1990). Children’s strategies: A brief history. In D. F. Bjorklund (Ed.), Children’s strategies: Contemporary views of cognitive development (pp. 1–22). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Keeney, F. J., Cannizzo, S. R., & Flavell, J. H. (1967). Spontaneous and induced verbal rehearsal in a recall task. Child Development, 38, 953–966. Miller, P. H. (1990). The development of strategies of selective attention. In D. F. Bjorklund (Ed.), Children’s strategies: Contemporary views of cognitive development (pp. 157– 184). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Moely, B. E., Olson, F. A., Hawles, T. G., & Flavell, J. H. (1969). Production deficiency in young children’s clustered recall. Developmental Psychology, 1, 26–34. Naus, M. J., & Ornstein, P. A. (1983). Development of memory strategies: Analysis, questions and issues. In M. T. H. Chi (Ed.), Trends in memory development research (Contributions to human development, Vol. 9, pp. 1–30). Basel: Karger. Pressley, M., & McCormick, C. B. (1995). Advanced educational psychology. New York: Harper Collins. Schneider, W., & Pressley, M. (1989). Memory development between 2 and 20. New York: Springer. Siegler, R. S. (1987). The perils of averaging data over strategies: An example from children’s addition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 116, 250–264. Siegler, R. S., & Jenkins, E. (1989). How children discover strategies. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Wellman, H. M. (1988). The early development of memory strategies. In F. E. Weinert & M. Perlmutter (Eds.), Memory development: Universal changes and individual differences (pp. 1–29). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
