The Locus of Organization Failures in Children's Recall

Abstract

LANGE, GARRETT, and GRIFFITH, SARALYN B. The Locus of Organization Failures in Children's Recall. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1498-1502. To examine the extent that poor output organization in children's free recall can be attributed to (a) insufficient awareness of optimal stimulus organizations, that is, input failures, and (b) failures to make use of acquired organization knowledge to guide recall, that is, integration failures, the present research was designed to contrast children's recall clustering before and after they acquired stable input organizations in a sort-to-criterion task. 120 subjects-24 from grade levels P, 1, 4, 7, and college-performed two successively presented, procedurally identical, series of recall-sort-recall tasks. Consistent with the findings of Lange and Jackson and of Worden, even the very young children showed high levels of output organization after the sorting task. However, the very poor presort clustering scores found at all age levels substantiate the argument that input failures are principally responsible for low levels of output organization shown by both children and adults with unrelated materials in traditional viewing-recall studies.