The present study investigated the relationship between developmental shifts in the organization of materials and developmental changes in deliberate strategy use. Second- and fourth-grade children were presented with clusterable sort/recall lists representing the factorial combinations of high and low inter-item association and high and low category relatedness. Strategy use in the task was rated by the experimenter and also assessed via self-reports. General and task-related strategy knowledge (metamemory) were also examined. Second graders displayed more category clustering during recall for highly associated items than for weakly associated items, whereas older children showed high sensitivity to both organizational dimensions. Correlations among measures of metamemory and organizational behavior indicated that second graders were generally unaware of the importance of categorization strategies for facilitation of recall. On the other hand, sorting during study and task-related metamemory was found to be the most important predictor of fourth graders' recall performance, thus indicating that most fourth graders use categorization strategies deliberately. (Author/RH)