Abstract
One hundred and seventeen fourth-grade, sixth-grade, and college-age students studied stories with two different sets of instructions. One set of instructions asked the students to read carefully (control condition); the other set of instructions directed the students to prepare to answer previously-memorized assigned questions (question-cued treatment condition). Viewing times were recorded for story segments both relevant and irrelevant to the assigned questions. Students were then asked to respond to the assigned (relevant) and unassigned (irrelevant) questions. All age groups in the question-cued treatment condition were similar in spending more time on the segments containing answers to assigned questions; however, only sixth-grade and college-age readers in the question-cued treatment condition recalled significantly more relevant than irrelevant information. The results suggest that an age change in the differential retention of relevant and irrelevant information, when questions are known beforehand, is not necessarily contingent upon a similar age change in attention allocation, as measured by the recorded viewing time. These results are interpreted as supporting developmental differences in the ability to effectively engage in purposive processing, a metacognitive skill.