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MANAGEMENT OF CHILDREN WITH PERCEPTUAL AND READING DISABILITIES
MANAGEMENT OF CHILDREN WITH PERCEPTUAL AND READING DISABILITIES
Pages 467-488
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From page 467... ...
BURTT RICHARDSON, JR. Relationship of Research to Health and Educational Services Research in the basic sciences has a long history of direct influence on developments in both health care and education.
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From page 468... ...
There is now increasing interest in the educational processes of individual children and, in particular, in relationships between behavioral patterns noted in the educational setting and descriptions arising from neurophysiologic and neuroanatomic research. The perspective of educational responsibility, heretofore limited to the traditional school years, is also undergoing considerable reappraisal.
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From page 469... ...
Those behavioral sciences which have provided the greatest progress in medical and educational thought have included psychodynamics, perception, cognition, and learning theory. It is well to recognize that behavior is the measured endpoint or correlate of most of these scientific studies, regardless of their theoretical basis; but the behavior described in most studies of child development has occurred in the natural environment, rather than in the controlled experimental setting.
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From page 470... ...
A supplementary diagnostic staff in the school frequently operates less to modify the classroom teacher's decisions than to make independent administrative decisions regarding class placement. Transmission of Information Since a highly relevant portion of a child's exposure to learning conditions is under the control of the parents, it is worth exploring points of contact through which information can be transmitted to them.
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From page 471... ...
APPLYING NEW KNOWLEDGE TO DIAGNOSIS If our intention is to provide health and educational services to all children, we must reconsider the very nature of our diagnostic and management procedures and be willing to modify those that are out of step with scientific evidence or our stated goals. In both health and education, there is a long record of excluding children from relevant experience and services on the grounds of developmental delays manifested by failure on readiness tests or other measures of general achievement.
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From page 472... ...
Relevant educational material may be presented to a child through a variety of stimulus modalities, revealing a pattern of function that indicates not only at which point in an educational program the child might be expected to succeed, but also through which channels of stimulus input success will be achieved most easily. Evaluation of a child's perceptual function in distinguishing signal from noise along various input channels is equally relevant in that both stimulus quality and input modality can be easily modified in the classroom or home.
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From page 473... ...
In summary, the remediation of learning disorders requires early and relevant diagnosis of deficits in the processes on which successful learning at home or in school depends. The number of children involved is so great that effective diagnostic procedures must be in the armamentarium of primary health-service personnel and classroom teachers.
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From page 474... ...
Robinson, Donald Shankweiler, and Francis A Young, Moderator Conference Implications for Education DR.
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From page 475... ...
Essentially, interdisciplinary research takes time -- time to learn to communicate, to coordinate efforts, and to study children longitudinally. This meeting is an example of the tremendous effort it takes to absorb the detailed knowledge, the vocabulary, and the concepts of related fields.
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From page 476... ...
We have developed a classroom screening instrument that identifies about 80 observable behavioral symptoms, which classroom teachers have been able to use with about 94% accuracy in identifying children who, on subsequent diagnostic work-up, did demonstrate some specific learning disability. The subsequent diagnostic work-up involved 3 days of testing, including full medical and psychoeducational examinations, speech and hearing assessments, and so forth.
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From page 477... ...
I see the observations reported at this conference coming together in a complex mosaic, which I think has great significance for the child who is failing to learn in school. I would like to present a preliminary inference that we are able to draw from our data5 -- and this is a glittering generalization -- namely, that nonlearning children seem to have the greatest amount of difficulty in reliably sequencing visual data in space and auditory data in time.
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From page 478... ...
For example, we have hardly begun to address the complexity of the reading task. Whether we are talking about learning disability, reading disability, or successful reading, there are, I hope, some common elements or dimensions that can be identified, and I think that these have not been defined very clearly at this conference.
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From page 479... ...
Yet, when we present a youngster with a reading task, we take away all those clues and present him with a page with only printed symbols on it; we remove gesture, inflection, and interpretation, so that he must now depend on visual perception alone, without all the other things that go along with oral communication. Thus, we are presenting him with a different kind of task.
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From page 480... ...
That is partly because of parental drive, ambition, and anxiety about the educational attainments of their offspring, but I am sure that it is also due in part to the fact that remedial teaching at an early stage in the state schools is preventing a great deal of later disability. In fact, it is preventing the failure that results from failure.
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From page 481... ...
The information taken in, in a single fixation, is useful to us for only a brief period, and the proportion of this information that can be used by the perceiver depends to a great extent on how quickly he can encode the information. Language is undoubtedly the most available and most ubiquitous code in human perception, and we have been shown how readily and how automatically observers encode visually perceived letter shapes, not into visual forms, but as speech (as letter names)
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From page 482... ...
It ought to follow, then, that fewer reading disabilities should occur among Italian children than among English-speaking children. That constitutes a straightforward question, but I do not think we have the answer to it.
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From page 483... ...
Obviously, some basic skills are necessary. But if a child fails, for example, in recognizing word shapes, then I would not spend my time teaching him by "look and say." I think I would encourage him to use the phonic approach, but I agree that he must first reach the stage of learning where he is able to read letters.
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From page 484... ...
She believes that her evidence indicates that there is a higher incidence of sex-linked genetically determined problems with poor readers. We are doing a gross chromosomal analysis, the buccal smear test, to see whether there are any indications of sexlinked anomalies in children with learning disabilities.
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From page 485... ...
The problem goes beyond the perceptual aspects. I think the visual aspects are important, but I believe we have ample evidence from research that auditory discrimination, sequencing, and language development are as important as visual perception.
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From page 486... ...
Although workers in various disciplines used the same terms, discussion revealed that the meanings of terms varied according to the discipline of the user. The Committee members were concerned with reading problems, but it was difficult to obtain a consensus on what a reading problem was or to define reading disability.
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From page 487... ...
Keogh made earlier: the question of continuity versus discontinuity in the process we call reading. I am aware that, from the standpoint of science, it may be proper to consider the components of the reading process a monotonic system and yet call the disability a definably different, qualitatively separate phenomenon.
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From page 488... ...
Following this conference, however, I am beginning to wonder whether children should be screened before they even enter school. It seems to me that the screening process ought to come much earlier than 6 years of age, when children enter school in this country, or 5, when they enter kindergarten.
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