Motor sequencing strategies in school-aged children.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to gain further insight into the normal development of praxis in children and to identify some of the learning strategies used by children during a motor-sequencing task. I analyzed the errors made by kindergarten and third-grade children during a motor-sequencing task and their reported memory strategies. I studied the following three groups of children: kindergarteners who could not learn the motor-sequencing task, kindergarteners who did learn the task, and third graders. The groups were significantly different with respect to age, their ability to perform a cognitive sequencing task, the number of perseverations made during the motor task, and the time required to perform a correctly recalled motor sequence. The kindergarteners tended to use kinesthetic coding for recall, and third graders more often used verbal rehearsal. The notion that motor sequencing develops along an orderly continuum with increasing age was supported. The results suggest that when teaching children motor-sequencing tasks, learning is enhanced by using verbal rehearsal of relevant movement labels.