CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 17, 244-257 (1992) The Role of Children’s Expertise in a Strategic Memory Task JANE F. GAULTNEY ANDDAVID F. BJORKLUND Florida Atlantic University AND WOLFGANG SCHNEIDER University of Wiirzburg, Institut fiir Psychologie, Wittelbachplatz 1, D-8700 Wiirzburg, Germany In a study intended to replicate and extend the findings from a recent experiment by Schneider and Bjorklund (1992), the expert/novice paradigm was used with second- and fourth-grade children in a sort/recall task. Children were classified as experts or novices for their knowledge of baseball, then given two sort/recall tasks, with a list consisting of either baseball or nonbaseball terms. Experts recalled more than novices on the baseball list only. While both groups used organizational strat- egies at sorting on the nonbaseball list, experts were marginally more strategic than novices on the baseball list, and no differences were found between the groups on either list for clustering. Baseball experts used more adultlike categories, suggest- ing that their enhanced levels of recall were attributed in part to strategy use, although there was also evidence that most of the substantial recall difference between the groups was attributed to item-specific effects associated with a more elaborated knowledge base. A second experiment using fifth-grade children on a multitrial sort/recall task using the baseball list also found increased recall by experts, and also found evidence of strategic behavior at the sort phase for trials 3 and 4. 0 1992 Academic Press. Inc. There seems to be little debate that differences in children’s knowledge base contribute significantly to developmental differences in memory per- formance (See Bjorklund, Muir-Broaddus, & Schneider, 1990; Ornstein, Baker-Ward, & Naus, 1988; Schneider & Fressley, 1989). Having a de- tailed knowledge base for to-be-remembered information facilitates mem- This research was funded by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. We thank the staff and students of Boca Raton, A, D. Henderson, and Wellington Elementary Schools for their cooperation in conducting this study, Mary Ann Scugoza and Nancy Hack for her help in data collection, and William S. Cassel, Thomas Coyle, Katherine K. Hamishfeger, and Claudia Roeber for comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. We also thank Donna Recht for making her test of baseball knowledge available to us. Requests for reprints should be sent either to David F. Bjorklund, Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic Univer- sity, Boca Raton, FL 33431 (E-mail address bjorkldf@fauvax) or to Wolfgang Schneider, Institut fur Psychologie, Wittelbachplatz 1, D-8700 Wiirzburg, Germany (E-mail address wschneider@vax.rz.uni.wuerzburg.dpe.de). 244 0361-476x/92 $5.00 Copyright 0 1992 by Academic Press, Inc. All riehts of reproduction in any form reserved.