Children's Free Recall and Clustering Related to List-Task Organization,Instruction to Learn and Presentation Rate

Free recall of 144 fifth grade children given a handwriting orienting task was improved by instruction to learn as opposed to incidental instruction and by slower presentation rate. Active taxonomic categorization surpassed passive writing of the same clustering list, which, in turn, surpassed writing of a nonclusterable list. Interactions were not significant although increased time tended to facilitate intentional more than incidental learning. In Exp. 2 using 72 children in Grades 3 and 6, the categorizing task was superior to blocked presentation, which, in turn, surpassed random presentation of the clusterable list. Clustering data did not parallel recall data, being influenced by list organization rather than by categorization. Clustering increased under slow presentation for incidental but not for intentional learning. The over-all results indicate that school-age children can improve learning under instruction and can benefit from changes in list and task, but that their own organization (clustering) is fortuitous to recall.