The Effects of Social Interaction and Verbalization on the Acquisition of an Organizational Memory Strategy

The effects of peer tutoring on third- and fifth-graders' use of an organizational memory strategy was examined. Children were first introduced to the memory task with highly associated items. Children then either taught another child the task, tape recorded instructions to give another child, or did the task again. Organizational memory was then retested measuring recall and clustering on moderately associated items. There was a significant effect due to condition with those in the Peer Tutoring condition recalling more items than the Control condition. Subsequent analyses comparing only the two experimental conditions revealed that the Peer Tutoring subjects recalled significantly more than the Tape-Recording subjects. Also, a significant grade effect was found with fifth graders recalling more items. There were no significant differences in the clustering data. Results suggest that both the Peer Tutoring and Tape-Recording conditions increased effective strategy transfer over the Control condition. However, Peer Tutoring subjects performed the highest on the transfer task, indicating both verbalization and social interaction play a role in the effectiveness of peer tutoring.