This paper describes an experiment which investigated the development of recall skills in 120 Caucasian, middle class children in the second, fourth, and sixth grades. Within each age group, four experimental groups were formed in which subjects were asked to remember and recall 16 nouns by: (1) forming mental representations of each word (imagery), a unit transformation; (2) stringing the words together as in a short story (narrative), a complex unit transformation; (3) grouping the words into conceptual categories (clustering), an order transformation; or (4) saying the words aloud as they were presented, learn-only control instruction. The results obtained indicated that the unit-order model used might prove useful in studying the relative effectiveness of mnemonics and cognitive processing across age groups. Of particular interest are the findings that: (1) children who received mnemonic instructions showed superior recall to learn-only subjects; and (2) simple transformations (imagery) were more effective at all age levels than more complex coding strategies (clustering and narrative). These findings replicate exactly the relationship found previously among different mnemonics with adult subjects. (ED)