Chapter 15 - Overview

Summary

Cognitive developmental research continues to shift from a mechanistic paradigm toward a more contextualized approach, especially in the search to uncover contextual factors that may play a role in cognitive development (see Rogoff, Dahl, & Callahan, 2018). This is certainly the case in the memory literature, where there exists rich documentation of children’s memory skills, but less research on the origins of mnemonic strategies and how they are supported by contextual aspects of children’s everyday lives. This chapter builds on the existing literature on children’s deliberate memory and strategy use and highlights one exemplar of this shift, namely the evolution of a program of research by Ornstein, Coffman and colleagues, the Classroom Memory Study. This collaborative work began as an effort to characterize children’s changing skills over time while simultaneously working to identify mechanisms in the elementary classroom context that may underlie children’s developing strategies for remembering – and has now evolved to include an examination of other cognitive outcomes as well as the development of experimental manipulations that can lead to teacher interventions that may facilitate children’s cognitive growth.