THE EFFECTS OF PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK ON MEMORY STRATEGY USE AND RECALLACCURACY IN STUDENTS WITH AND WITHOUT MILD MENTAL-RETARDATION

The research hypothesis was that memory strategy deficits can occur be cause of students' failure to understand the task and to evaluate thei r own performance. The effect of performance feedback on memory strate gy use, performance evaluation, and recall was assessed with students with and without mild mental retardation with a mental age of approxim ately 8.5 years. For students with retardation, feedback resulted in m ore accurate performance evaluation and recall, but memory strategy us e did not increase. By contrast, for students without retardation, fee dback resulted in more accurate performance evaluation and greater rec all accuracy and memory strategy use. We concluded that students with retardation may not have the appropriate memory strategies in their re pertoire and, therefore, feedback does not result in strategy use. It seems likely that memory strategy use in this population would be incr eased by a training package that includes strategy instruction as well as feedback.