Very little is known about the conditions under which young children acquire strategic means of remembering in natural learning environments. A promising line of research attributes the emergence of "internal remembering strategies" to formal schooling environments. Data gathered from 173 children in kindergarten through the third grade indicated that types of environmental differences perceived by the children were consistent with some of the causal dimensions proposed by schooling theorists. However, increasing evidence of strategic study and retrieval behavior in preschool children point up the limitations of schooling hypotheses. It is difficult to know how frequently and in what ways adults direct instructional activities to everyday memorization tasks with preschoolers, or how systematic and persistent adults are in attempting to gradually transfer remembering responsibilities and strategy usage to their children. Research suggests that while mothers often refer to and demonstrate the use of adult-like strategies for remembering, they seldom persist in requiring the child to use the strategy to self-regulate recall. Nevertheless, even 2- and 3-year-olds are taught and expected to remember to perform simple recurring and prescheduled activities on a daily basis. Such experiences undoubtedly afford young children at least a rudimentary means-goal understanding of the recall function and may account for some of the strategy knowledge and use found in primary school students. (RH)