Abstract: Allocation of study time is about the ability related to children’s learning strategies. There are many studies concerning children’s allocation of study time. However, the results are mixed about whether the middle age elementary school students can allocate their study time properly. Moreover, researchers have never compared the three different orientations (speed-oriented, accuracy-oriented, and speed / accuracy-oriented) in one study. The current study was conducted to explore the real rule of development of children’s ability of allocation of study time under those three conditions.

Method
We conducted three experiments, all focused on the three orientations separately. We adopted a 3 (age: Grade Two, Grade Four, Grade Six in Elementary School)*3 (difficulty of material: easy, average, difficult) mixed design.
Participants were 72 students in Grades 2, 4 and 6 in elementary schools. The children studied Chinese paired-words (with different difficulty), in the way of experimenter-paced, and were asked to choose one of the three paired-words to learn each time. with 8 seconds per screen, the participants had three paired-words to choose. The participants were then asked to retrieve as soon as they could right after they studied. The program was designed through E-prime. The words were shown by a Dell Handbook, and time of studying was recorded by Dell as well. The Dell PC recorded the total time per item, no matter how many times the participate studied it. Finally, we analyzed those entire data with SPSS.

Results
The main findings are as follows.
(1) The ability of allocation of study time increased with age under speed-orientation. Grade 2 children did not use the strategy, while Grade 4 and Grade 6 children did. There was a difference on RT of retrieving between Grade 4 and Grade 6, but there was no difference on accuracy of retrieving.
(2) There was no difference on the performance of allocation of study time among children of different ages under accuracy-orientation. They all allocated longest time on easy items. However, there was a difference of retrieving accuracy between Grade 2 and Grade 4 children.
(3) The ability of allocation of study time increased with age under speed/ accuracy-orientation. Grade 2 children did not use the strategy, while Grade 4 and Grade 6 children both did. Grade 4 children did not get better performance on retrieving accuracy although they used the strategy of allocation of study time as Grade 6 children did.

Conclusions
(1) There was a trend that the ability of study time allocation increased with age.
(2) The orientations had produced different influences on allocation of study time among children at different ages.
(3) There were 3 stages in the development of children’s ability to use strategy of study time allocation: first, without using strategy at all, second, unstable effect with using strategy, and finally, stable effect with using strategy

Key words: allocation of study time, speed-oriented, accuracy-oriented, speed/accuracy-oriented