Nursery World - Learning & Development: Memory

How do children learn and remember information, and what approaches
will help them reach their full potential? In an extract from her book
on child psychology, Usha Goswami explains.

Going to school makes dramatic new demands on young children. Rather than occurring as part of everyday experience, learning, reasoning and remembering become active goals in their own right. Successful school performance requires children to develop knowledge about their own information-processing skills: 'How good is my memory?'

Children must also be able to monitor their own cognitive performance. School requires children to develop knowledge about the kinds of cognitive demands made by different classroom tasks. Psychological research shows rapid development in all of these 'meta-cognitive' skills between the ages of three and seven years.

At the same time, children are dealing with the non-trivial requirements of learning to read and write, and learning mathematics. As both reading and mathematics are cultural inventions that have been developed over hundreds of years, it is perhaps unsurprising that children take a while to acquire them successfully.

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