The purpose of this study was to examine, in detail, the observable movement behavior in the performance of a child attempting to perform a complex movement task from a visual model. A secondary focus concerned the usefulness of Labanotation as a method for data recording in the study of complex manipulative movement. This was a single case study of a 10-year-old boy as he attempted to perform a complex manipulative movement task from a nonverbal, visual, video-taped movement performance. The movement task was unfamiliar to the child prior to his participation in the study. The investigator asked the child to view the movement task. The specific task involved throwing, and catching, and striking a 7-inch plastic ball with different body parts. The use of all spaces around the body, varing the amount of effort and moving in relation to the ball were considered parts of the task. Video-taping of the movement performances of this 10-year-old boy proceeded on 6 separate days during a 2-week period. Approximately 10 minutes of movement activity were recorded on each of the 6 days. The movement performances were Labanotated from the video tapes then transcribed and analyzed. There were three categories of data: the first included the number of times the child viewed the visual model during each data collection session, as well as any specific segments of the visual model he viewed. The second data category consisted of the child's verbal behavior in viewing the model tape and during the debriefing discussion. The third and primary data category consisted of the video tapes of the movement performances. These data were presented in the form of frequency counts for movement components and medians and ranges for movement sequence variables
