Cognitive developmental research continues to shift from a mechanistic paradigm toward a more contextualized approach, especially in the search to uncover contextual factors that may play a role in cognitive development (see Rogoff, Dahl, & Callahan, 2018). This is certainly the case in the memory literature, where there exists rich documentation of children’s memory skills, but less research on the origins of mnemonic strategies and how they are supported by contextual aspects of children’s everyday lives. This chapter builds on the existing literature on children’s deliberate memory and strategy use and highlights one exemplar of this shift, namely the evolution of a program of research by Ornstein, Coffman and colleagues, the Classroom Memory Study. This collaborative work began as an effort to characterize children’s changing skills over time while simultaneously working to identify mechanisms in the elementary classroom context that may underlie children’s developing strategies for remembering – and has now evolved to include an examination of other cognitive outcomes as well as the development of experimental manipulations that can lead to teacher interventions that may facilitate children’s cognitive growth.

This chapter builds on the original findings of the Classroom Memory Study and outlines the ways in which children’s academic skills are also influenced by the types of language that (1) parents use during the course of conversations about the past, and (2) teachers use during classroom instruction. We present findings from a number of studies to illustrate that kindergarten students’ accuracy and strategy use in the context of mathematics is influenced by exposure to metacognitive language at home and at school. In addition, we explore the impact of kindergarten teachers’ metacognitive language on children’s mathematics accuracy and strategy use across the first two years of formal school for those children who enter school with relatively low mathematical knowledge. Finally, we emphasize that a commitment to examining instructional approaches and methods of assessment that focus on students’ metacognitive understanding will be critical to the evolution of the Classroom Memory Study and to studying the socialization of children’s cognition more broadly.