Retention of bilateral performance as a function of practice order

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of practice order and initial performance hand on the bilateral retention of a simple tracking skill for 44 undergraduate volunteers. The apparatus was a Lafayette Model 30014 photoelectric rotary pursuit. The circle template was employed with rotation speed set at 20 rpm. Subjects were given 20-sec. trials and required to reach a criterion of 70% time on target twice in succession with both hands. For original practice, subjects were randomly assigned to one of four practice groups: preferred serial, non-preferred serial, preferred sequence and non-preferred sequence. Subjects' performance was recorded as the number of trials required to achieve criterion for both hands. One month later subjects were retested and scored in the same manner. A 2 X 2 X 2 analysis of variance with repeated measures on the last factor was used to determine the effects of initial hand, order of practice, testing periods, and the appropriate interactions. The results indicated that subjects' performance for the two testing periods differed significantly; retest was superior. Order of practice was significant and the sequential order more efficient during both learning and retest.