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Poster #6 - Linking Parent-Child Conversations to Kindergarteners' Autobiographical Memory Skills and Deliberate Strategy Use

Fri, March 22, 9:45 to 11:00am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Over the course of the elementary school years, children improve in their ability to use strategies for remembering (Schneider & Pressley, 1997), but little is known about home-level factors that affect the emergence of these deliberate memory skills (see Langley, Coffman & Ornstein, 2017 for an exception). In this proposal, we adopt the social constructivist perspective and argue that children’s strategic memory abilities are derived, in part, from the skills that children gain during parent-child conversations about past events. Consistent with previous research on parent-child reminiscing (Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006), we hypothesize that children exposed to high levels of elaborative language during past-event conversations will report more detailed memories of these events. Moreover, it is likely that the underlying processes of encoding, storing, and retrieving information that are linked to autobiographical memory are also implicated in the development of children’s deliberate memory abilities. Therefore, we posit that children of highly elaborative parents who demonstrate enhanced autobiographical memory will also demonstrate more sophisticated strategic memory skills.

Data were drawn from an ongoing longitudinal study of children’s memory as they transition to elementary school. Fifty-one kindergarteners (49% female) were assessed with a battery that included both autobiographical and deliberate memory tasks. In a parent-child reminiscing task (Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1993), parent-child dyads discussed two jointly-experienced events. These conversations were coded for elaborative content, and parents were classified as high or low elaborative, based on a median split. Children’s memory contributions were also coded. In a free recall with organizational training task (Moely et al., 1992), children were asked to remember 16 line drawings (4 from 4 categories) during the fall, winter, and spring of the academic year. At Time 1, children completed a baseline trial (measuring spontaneous sorting), a training trial in which they were instructed in categorical organization, and a generalization trial that served as an indicator of their abilities to take advantage of this strategy instruction. Times 2 and 3 allowed for additional generalization trials, and strategic sorting was indexed by the Adjusted Ratio of Clustering score.

Children’s autobiographical memory elaborations differed as a function of their parents’ style, such that children of high elaborative parents reported more detailed recollections than children of parents low in elaboration (F(1, 49)=19.58, p<.01). Additionally, parent reminiscing style was associated with children’s deliberate memory skills. Although children’s sorting at the fall baseline trial did not differ as a function of their parents’ conversational style, children of highly-elaborative parents were more likely to take up instruction in strategic sorting after training than children of low-elaborative parents, as evidenced by higher ARC scores on the generalization trial at Time 1 (see Figure 1) (F(43,6)=5.35, p=.02). These findings suggest that children who have elaborative parents may benefit more from strategic training, and therefore may also be better prepared to take advantage of classroom instruction. Given that children sort at comparable levels by the end of kindergarten, regardless of parental style, it is important to consider the impact of the classroom on autobiographical and deliberate memory.

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