Developmental Psychology 1984. Vol 20. No 5. 975-987 Copyright 19M by the American Psychological Association, Inc Use of Causal Attributions About Recall Performance to Assess Metamemory and Predict Strategic Memory Behavior in Young Children William V. Fabricius and John W. Hagen University of Michigan An important problem in metamemory research has been to demonstrate a re- lationship between children's knowledge about memory strategies and their de- veloping tendency to employ those strategies in solving memory problems. The difficulty of demonstrating such a relationship may be due to the methods previously used to assess metamemory. The present study used children's causal attributions about their recall performance to assess their knowledge of a category-sorting strategy. First and second graders were exposed to a memory task in which their recall performance varied as a function of their incidentally elicited sorting behavior. When asked what had affected their recall, only some children at each grade identified sorting as a causal factor. Attributions about sorting could not be accounted for by differential memory for sorting behavior or by differential use of sorting on previous trials. Causal attributions, but neither previous sorting nor nonattributional verbal reports about sorting behavior, predicted use of a sorting strategy in a standard, study-recall task 1 week later. Furthermore, children who had attributed recall to sorting tended not to use rehearsal strategies on the subsequent task, suggesting that causal attributions reflected their views about what were the most important influences on recall. Finally, children's ability to assess their recall performance and their insight into possible mechanisms by which sorting affects recall are discussed as avenues for future research into how children acquire their ideas about factors that affect memory. Recent research has investigated childrens' developing knowledge of cognitive phenomena, or their metacognition (Brown, 1978; Flavell, 1978). Within this broad domain, metamem- ory development has received the most atten- tion (Cavanaugh & Perlmutter, 1982; Flavell & Wellman, 1977). One important problem in metamemory research has been to dem- onstrate a relationship between children's de- Portions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, August, 1981. The authors would like to thank Julie Lori for her in- valuable help in collecting the data and Barbara Nadon and Roseann O'Rourke for their help with an earlier pilot study. Helpful comments on an earlier draft were received from Craig Barclay, Scott Paris, and Henry Wellman. Fred Bookstein generously provided statistical advice. We would also like to thank the personnel, parents, and children of Eberwhite School, Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the final study was conducted and those of Angell School, where the pilot study was conducted. Requests for reprints should be sent to William V. Fa- bricius, who is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602. veloping tendency to employ memory strat- egies (Hagen, Jongeward, & Kail, 1975) and their memory knowledge, in particular their means-ends knowledge (Paris, 1978) about different strategies that affect memory. Al- though the promise of such a relationship has stimulated much metamemory research (Brown, 1975), evidence for it has been difficult to obtain. A typical finding, for example, has been that children who know that categori- zation aids recall are no more likely to use a category-sorting strategy than are children who do not have that knowledge (Salatas & Flavell, 1976). To date, evidence suggesting a relationship between strategy knowledge and use has mainly come from one approach, which in- volves training children in both strategy use and strategy knowledge. In these studies (Bor- kowski, Levers, & Gruenenfelder, 1976; Ken- nedy & Miller, 1976; Paris, Newman, & McVey, 1982; Ringel & Springer, 1980) all children are first trained to use a strategy, and then feedback about the effectiveness of the 975