A paired-associate task was given to 119 middle-class fourth and fifth graders to investigate the nature and development of mediational strategies in children's learning. Imagery and sentence mediators which linked the stimuli and responses of pictorial paired associates were either provided by an experimenter or generated by the children. While both experimenter-provided and subject-generated sentence and imagery strategies were equally facilitative at acquisition and on a retest a week later, variability was greater in the subject-generated strategy groups. The latter result suggests that individual differences related to strategy generation are greater than those related to strategy utilization in children at this age. (Author/DP)