Organization in children's recall of information about movement

Children's recall of five randomly presented movement distances was studied as a function of three organization groups. The group given subjective organization was free to recall the movements in any order. The group given experimenter-presented order had to recall the movements from shortest to longest. The forced-random group was required to recall the movements in the same order in which they were randomly presented. 60 boys and girls, 7 to 8 and 11 to 12 yr. old, volunteered. No appreciable difference in mean absolute error was found between the first two groups, but they did recall the movement distances with less error than the forced-random group. It was concluded that the organization of movement information is important for effective recall by children, but subjective organization was not superior to an organization imposed by the experimenter.