“The Attempt to Teach”
A Diagnostic Method Illustrated by the Clinic Teaching of Typical Cases. :Author: Gladys E. Poole, M.A., Clinic Teacher, University of Pennsylvania.
The Department of Clinic Teaching was established at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1919 in connection with the Psychological Clinic conducted by Dr Lightner Witmer. Clinic teaching aims to complete the psychological examination which has revealed the mental status of the person examined; the “attempt to teach” shows the trainability of the person; used in this way it is an important method. Clinic teaching of a case usually extends over a period of one week, one hour daily; exceptionally difficult cases are carried over a longer period; in a few instances they extend over as long a period as two months. This department offers an opportunity for senior and graduate psychology students to learn and to practice the methods of approach in the training of children whether normal or retarded because of specific mental defects. Furthermore, it enables them to group quickly the specific difficulties with which the education of these children is concerned. This year a special study has been made of cases brought to the Psychological Clinic by mothers, teachers or social workers because the children did not learn to read in the public schools. Although unable to learn to read through regular class room instruction in the public schools, they were diagnosed in the Psychological Clinic as mentally normal. The methods and the results of Clinic teaching are illustrated in the following reports of typical cases. Walter: Case No. 3548
Walter was brought to the Psychological Clinic February 14, 1920, by his mother and grade principal because he was fourteen years old and had not learned to read with first grade proficiency. He started school at seven and now by the grace of a kind-hearted teacher he was in the fifth grade of a Philadelphia school. The examiner found an attractive boy, well built and neatly dressed, who did not speak unless spoken to and then only to answer in monosyllables; his articulation was indistinct. Walter never smiled. In the psychological tests he showed good trainability and discrimination; he employed an intelligent method in solving new problems. His auditory memory span was five, his visual memory span was six. There was nothing unusual about the developmental or family history, the other two children had done satisfactory school work. Socially, Walter seemed to conform well; his teacher reported that he got along all right with the other boys of his age on the playground and took part in their games; she thought him just an average boy in this respect. Both Walter and his mother said he was fond of working around machinery and that he spent his spare time in his father’s garage or in assisting his brother, who was a contractor. Walter was diagnosed as apparently normal and was taken on for clinical teaching andf’observation in order to determine why he had not learned to read.
In reading Walter attempted to pronounce all words through a phonetic analysis of their elemental sounds, but his use of these elemental sounds was so inaccurate that the resulting pronunciations of words were but meaningless jumbles of sounds. He sounded ten consonants fairly accurately, but he could not differentiate between the elemental sounds of the five vowels nor could he give the finer differences between consonants, such as the difference in sound between m and n, s and sh. He did not experience much difficulty in learning reading vocabulary words by rote; he learned the following sixteen unfamiliar words in the story of “The Little Red Hen” (Winston Primer, pp. 1-9) during one word drill period, called, help, plant, little, red, hen, found, grew, did, some, wheat, said, who, cut, grind, make. The next day he recognized ten of these words. As soon as the daily drills upon reading vocabulary words was discontinued Walter went back to his first erratic pronunciation of the words. The elemental sounds upon which he had failed or had given in a slipshod manner were re-taught and drilled upon; daily drills in phonics were given, the short vowel sounds were carefully taught and drilled upon as individual sounds in word building and word analysis. Walter had eleven daily one hour drills upon elemental sounds and family phonograms; he acquired proficiency in analyzing words when these words were arranged in families and headed by a familiar “sight word” containing the family phonogram. Walter’s defeat lay in the use of vowel sounds; when he pronounced words containing these sounds and out of their regular group he used them promiscuously, and when his teacher questioned the resulting eccentric pronunciation of words he ran the gauntlet of vowel sounds, long and short, until he approached the correct sound. The vowels were poorly sounded at best and no amount of drill upon them, either alone or in words or sentences, seemed to fix them in his mind Walter continued to mutilate the vowels as badly as ever. He pronounced words and sounded letters without moving the muscles of his face, lips or mouth; his face seemed stiff like a mask, but there was no evidence of facial paralysis. His clinic teacher was in despair. Walter had not learned to read by the word method, and her brief attempt to teach him by this method had been unsatisfactory. The attempt to give him a workable key to the pronunciation of words through word analysis was a failure. Walter, normal in other respects, was facing a verdict of illiteracy. Had a diagnosis of his case been given at this time it might have been that he lacked the fine sense of discrimination between the sounds of the letters of the English language and the retentivity necessary for learning and retaining words, and that the prognosis for improvement was unfavorable.
As a last resort Dr Twitmyer, who has charge of the corrective speech work, was called in for a consultation over Walter’s case. After a careful examination of the boy Dr Twitmyer reported that the organs of articulation were soft and flabby and consequently insensitive to the usual stimuli for correct articulation of sounds and words: Walter was not able to call up adequate kinaesthetic images of the articulation of sounds or words. Dr Twitmyer suggested that the regular lessons in phonetics be discontinued until a later period in Walter’s training and prescribed instead a course in corrective breathing exercises to build up memorial motor images of the movements of the organs of articulation in speech. These exercises were followed by exercises which stressed “the three cardinal positions of the mouth for practically all of the sounds in the English language.”1 Walter did the breathing and articulatory exercises persistently and systematically three times a day, twice at home and once a day under the direction of his clinic teacher. These exercises very soon fixed the long ee sound for Walter and after a very little additional drill he was able to read such sentences as “I eat meat”, “See the geese eat meat,” accurately; the rest of the long vowel sounds were now taught without much difficulty, and Walter began to do a little reading of nursery rhymes which emphasized the use of long vowels as, “I have a little sister, They call her peep, peep, peep, She wades in the water, Deep, deep, deep.”
As soon as memorial kinaesthetic images of the movements involved in taking the three cardinal positions of the mouth for Dr Edwin B. Twitmyer.
sounds were obtained the intermediate steps between these positions were taught, and these in Walter’s case proved the crucial exercise. As Walter built up correct kinaesthetic images of these positions he gained control over the muscular manipulation of the organs of articulation required for sounding each letter. After some strenuous practice upon these exercises he was able to sound any regular vowel from dictation, but he failed to connect these sounds with the printed symbols. This connection was easily made by a few drills in which the directions for the exercises were read from the blackboard instead of taken from oral dictation. Walter learned to connect the long vowel sounds with their written or printed symbols before he did the same with the short vowel sounds.
During the breathing exercise drills the broader distinctions between the consonant sounds gradually cleared up, but Walter continued to enunciate incorrectly the consonants which involved fine distinctions of sounds such as, m and n, f and v, b and d, s and sh, etc. He quickly acquired the proper enunciation of these letters by a few exercises which emphasized the difference in pronunciation. At the end of two weeks (ten hours) of drill upon the articulatory exercises Walter suddenly “burst into reading”; the ability seemed to come to him overnight. On the eleventh day he sounded words containing the short vowel sounds accurately and began to use them in his reading. He read the first twenty-eight pages in a primer which he had not seen before, following this he read “The Story of Little Black Sambo” without assistance from his teacher. It was slow, to be sure, but he read with intelligence. Walter had shown good persistence from the first. He now read for two or three hours at a stretch without a fagging of interest. He was delighted with the result of his labors and read this simple story with an almost unbelievable pride, sounding the unfamiliar words as he went along and apparently making these words a part of his permanent reading vocabulary. He needed, of course, a great deal of drill before he could make his word analysis rapid and finally automatic. Before he came under our observation Walter spent part of his Sunday mornings looking at the Sunday “funny paper”, but now he says that he not only looks at the pictures but reads the highly intellectual remarks that accompany them, and he adds with a smile that he reads part of the front page of the newspaper. Walter’s new accomplishment has given him a mighty pride in himself, he has a new sense of self-respect. He has discarded his grandfather walk; he smiles when he comes into the room and says “Good morning” without waiting for the cue. Six weeks after his first appearance at the Psychological Clinic Walter was dismissed.
“THE ATTEMPT TO TEACH177
He had acquired enough proficiency in analyzing new words to be able to read a new primer in an hour. His parents were now advised to send him to a tutor who would give him necessary practice in reading progressively more difficult material until he reached his maximum of efficiency. He was seven years retarded in reading when he came under clinical observation. He had made up one year of this retardation when he was dismissed. The final result lies in his hands. He will succeed or fail in his attempt to learn to read as his desire to do so determines.
In brief, the case represents the following picture: Walter at fourteen had failed to learn to read by regular group instruction, because he possessed a specific articulatory defect which made it impossible for him to discriminate between the elemental sounds of the letters making up the English vocabulary. Individual instruction in reading and phonics failed to reach the seat of the trouble and no permanent progress was made. Special breathing and articulatory exercises corrected the defect, and Walter began to read immediately, much to his satisfaction. The prognosis for his ultimate recovery seems favorable.
Benjamin: Case No. 3417
Benjamin was first brought to the Psychological Clinic by the school social worker; she reported him backward in school. The boy was ten years seven months old; he was not unattractive. His big baby-blue eyes were fringed with dark curling lashes; he was slenderly built and neatly dressed; he had a cheery disposition. However, he lacked the initiative and “pep” characteristic of the American boy. He was in the third grade, but he was there for “convenience” and not because of the merit of his work. He had started to school at the age of seven. He had repeated the first and second grades once and then had been promoted to the third grade because he “fit the seats better”. His teacher had no complaint to make except of his backwardness. The developmental and family history were negative. The school social worker reported the mother to be an intelligent woman, interested in her children and anxious to help them get on in school. Benjamin’s thirteen-year-old sister is in the eighth grade; an older brother entered the high school at fifteen. The parents are Lithuanian, and very little English is spoken in the home.
Except for defective visual imagery, partly due to defective eyesight, Benjamin was diagnosed as mentally normal. His I. Q. was 92. Dr H. J. Humpstone diagnosed the case; he recommended that the boy be examined by an oculist for correction of vision and that the correction be followed by clinical teaching. The object of this procedure was to discover why Benjamin had not learned to read, and if possible to determine upon specific recommendations for his training. The oculist’s subsequent report showed that Benjamin was suffering from hypermetropia. This report suggested that the physical visual defect was not serious enough to account entirely for Benjamin’s lack of visual imagery, rather that his lack of visual imagery was increased because of his defective vision. Benjamin was fitted with glasses and two weeks later reported at the clinic for observation and teaching.
In view of the examining psychologist’s diagnosis, the clinical teaching naturally had reference to Ben j amin’s backwardness in school subjects. A general examination showed that in the Courtis Standardized Arithmetic Tests Benjamin fell below the lowest scores for the third grade in fundamentals. Because of his inability to read he did not even attempt the Courtis Reasoning problems. However, when given the oral arithmetic problems of the Binet-Simon tests he proved to have fair reasoning ability and passed readily at the Year IX level these problems; “If I were to buy four cents worth of candy and gave the storekeeper ten cents, how much money would I get back?” “If I bought twenty-one cents worth and gave the storekeeper twenty-five cents, how much would I get back?” In the Ayres Measuring Scale for Handwriting he scored below the median for the second grade. Since his reading vocabulary consisted of four words?the, boy, a, little?he completely failed to score in that subject. In phonetics he had no proficiency; he knew no elemental sounds, consonant blends, nor phonogram families, except at. He was further handicapped by a slight language defect; he sounded letter d as if it were t, and t as if it were p/ he pronounced why “y”, thank “dank”, the “dee”, omitted g from words containing that letter, and omitted the final ending from words ending in t or d or g. Armed with this meager equipment, Benjamin had been exposed to third grade work for seven months. Can we wonder that his teacher complained of immunity to her group instruction? Can we wonder that upon his arrival at the clinic for observation he showed no enthusiasm over learning to read? During three and a half years spent in school he had not learned to read, and he was acutely aware of the fact; he was convinced that he could not learn to read; moreover, he was resigned to his fate. Naturally, with this orientation he looked upon any attempt to teach him as a foolish waste of time.
After he had been coming to clinic for fifteen days, an hour each day, his attitude towards us changed. He walked briskly into the clinic with a smile upon his face and a cheery “Good morning” for every one, marched to the bookcase, picked out an easy primer and proceeded to read to himself, sounding out unfamiliar words. He came early and stayed late; every minute that he was not with his clinic teacher he spent attempting to read. He had discovered that he not only could read, but, what was more amazing to him that he enjoyed reading. He had acquired a reading vocabulary of 230 words which he knew at sight; he also knew the phonics necessary to analyze most of the regular words generally found in first and second grade readers. The phonetic drills and a few additional drills upon correct tongue placement for such sounds as d and t eliminated Benjamin’s speech defect. He passed without difficulty the third grade spelling test (Ayres Measuring Scale for Ability in Spelling).
In these few hours of individual instruction he learned more mechanics of reading than he had learned during three and a half years in a class with fifty other children. He had not responded to the educational stimulus of the school; overcrowding had proven an even greater handicap to him than to the majority of the pupils of his grade.
The major cause of the boy’s failure to read must have resided within himself. We looked first to the defective vision as the explanation, but the oculist’s report suggested that the visual defect was not serious enough to account entirely for Benjamin’s lack of visual imagery. However this may have been, his lack of visual imagery interfered decidedly with his educational progress. When he was shown a word printed upon a perception card or upon the blackboard, even after a thorough word recognition drill, he failed to recognize the word the next time he saw it; apparently he had formed no mental image of the word. “Sight” words, words that are not easily analyzed, were recognized only after a great many repetitions which set up auditory and kinaesthetic, as well as visual, images. Since by this means he soon learned to analyze and pronounce words at sight, it seemed necessary to reinforce his visual memory by establishing vivid auditory and kinaesthetic memories. His mental examination showed that his auditory and kinaesthetic memories were far superior to his visual; this fact seemed to have been overlooked by his former reading teachers.
In the first story which Benjamin read, “The Boy and the Goat” (Winston Primer, pp. 10-19), there were thirty-two words which he failed to recognize; the story also used the four words that Benjamin already knew. He recognized the thirty-two words after nine drills. The method of procedure was to teach seven words the first day, review these seven and teach seven more the next day, and so on until the. list was completed. Seven words were taken as the number to be taught each day because he had a memory span of seven. In connection with the word drills he had lessons in phonics, but little drill was given upon elemental sounds and consonant blends except through repeating them as they were used in word analysis. The phonogram family words were taught as they occurred in the reading lesson, and as the3r were needed for analysis of new words. Possibl}five minutes a day was given to drills upon these phonograms. By this hit-and-miss method he learned during the fifteen lessons to use fifteen elemental sounds, nineteen consonant blends and thirteen phonogram family words, such as at, in, ill, all. At first the usual procedure was to teach word recognition by rote, analysis of the rote words in consonants and family words, the blending of these consonants and phonograms to form new words, and finally a pronunciation of new words through their analysis. Benjamin did not recognize several of the words in the story even after seven daily drills, until the words had been analyzed and the phonograms drilled upon. For example, he did not learn to recognize after until he learned to recognize it through analysis; then as soon as he sounded the first syllable af the image came and he said after; this was the result of kinaesthetic and auditory imagery rather than visual.
The thirteenth day that Benjamin came to the clinic he was drilled upon the words needed for reading the ” Lambikin ” (Winston Primer, pp. 70-82). This story used forty words that had been drilled upon in previous stories, and there were thirty new words. Of the forty old words, he recognized thirty-eight; the two failures were which and what, words that are not easily analyzed. He analyzed and pronounced twenty-two of the thirty new vocabulary words. The remaining eight words which he failed to pronounce were taught as sight words; they were drilled upon until he recognized them in any order in which they were presented to him; the following day the same thirty words were again presented; he analyzed and pronounced the same twenty-two words as on the preceding day, but eleven of these were analyzed and pronounced at sight, while the remaining eleven were pronounced after a slow analysis. He failed to recognize the eight words that he had missed before. These words were again drilled upon until he recognized them instantl}’ upon their presentation as sight words. After this second word drill Benjamin was asked to read the story of the “Lambikin”. He read it intelligently and with enjoyment, although it was evident that much more practice would be needed before he became a fluent reader. He recognized at sight fifteen of the twenty-two analyzable new words, and by a slower analysis identified six more. This left but one failure in pronunciation and a failure to recognize five of the seven analyzable words upon which he had been twice drilled. The story of “The Boy and the Goat” contained three hundred words spread over ten pages. Benjamin read the ten pages in five lessons; each day he read two pages in advance and reviewed from the beginning of the story. In this way he read every page of the story except the last two more than once. No attempt was made at reproduction until he had completed the story. After the final reading lesson he reproduced the story, and gave twenty-eight out of the forty-seven ideas expressed. The following copy of two pages of the Primer and Benjamin’s reproduction show a connected reproduction, although several ideas are omitted: Primer Story. Reproduction.
A little boy had a goat. A boy had a little goat. The goat ran into the woods. Once he ran into the woods with the He found some grass. goat. The goat wanted to eat the grass. After awhile the boy wanted to go The little boy wanted to go home. home. The goat would not go home. But the goat wanted to eat some grass. Then the little boy began to cry. Then the boy sat down and started to cry.
After one rapid reading of the story, “The Lainbikin,” he reproduced it, omitting but three ideas. Benjamin’s first attempts at spelling were erratic. His first exercise was to write from dictation ten words which he had learned to recognize as “sight words”, namely, he, and, ran, into, ivoods, had, some, grass and found. Two of these words, into and ran, were spelled correctly; the rest might have been picked at random from an almanac, as far as any connection between the word and its spelling was concerned. For example grass was spelled samss. As Benjamin progressed new words that he recognized were added to the list until he was writing forty words from dictation. His attention was not called to his mistakes and no spelling drills were given, but he was taught to analyze the words during the phonetic drills. After the fourth drill in phonetics he became noticeably dissatisfied with hie spelling and made a conscious effort to spell the words correctly by first sounding them. The eleventh time the words were dictated he misspelled only seven words out of the list of forty words, and these were words which he had not been taught to analyze. During the process of learning he spelled began in the following ways: bean, beand, geang, becenber, bent and finally began; along was spelled load. lont and alond; bumblebee was spelled benber buss, bebent be, banber, beumlbee. Analysis of his mistakes in spelling showed that he was not yet sensitive to the sound of certain letters such as g, d, and t. This was especially true when he was asked to reproduce them in graphic form. He spelled goat orally, but when asked to write it he wrote E instead of g; after spelling correctly it and is orally, he wrote ht and hs. He spelled orally the first seventy-five words in his reading vocabulary with few mistakes, but when he wrote the same words from dictation the number of mistakes multiplied by three. He seemed to have difficulty in visualizing words long enough to transcribe them. He was unable to make the connection between the auditory stimulus and the kinaesthetic reproduction. Columns C, D and E of the Ayres Spelling Test for Measuring Ability in Spelling contain words which Benjamin had learned to visualize in the course of the phonetic drills, and these words he wrote with third grade accuracy. He failed, however, to write the words of Column H, which were analyzable but not familiar (sit, lot, etc.); previously he had spelled these words orally without difficulty.
This brief study of Benjamin’s case seemed to justify the conclusion that the boy was trainable in spite of his specific defect, and that the best results will be obtained if the approach is made through fields other than the visual. This fact, however, should not be minimized: when a child with a specific defect is taught with a group of fifty other children not similarly handicapped the possibility of the defective child’s progress is slight. The final recommendation sent to the school social worker read: “Benjamin is handicapped by lack of visual imagery, which suggests he should be taught through auditory and motor senses in so far as practical. His reading should be strengthened by a thorough knowledge of phonetics, and by much auditory-motor drill upon words that are not easily analyzed. He should have special tutoring in reading and arithmetic until he is brought up to grade.”
David: Case No. 3369 The same social worker who brought us Benjamin brought us David. David was reported backward and incorrigible in school. Thirteen years of age, he was tall and had a well shaped head and delicate features; altogether his general appearance was rather prepossessing. He was in the fourth grade in school, but like Benjamin, he had been promoted for convenience and not because of his proficiency. He had started school at the age of six; he spent one year in the first grade, two years in the second grade and two in the third grade, and he was now spending his third year in the fourth grade. His teacher reported him as being a most disturbing element in the school; he could not be forced to study, although, outside of school he was not adverse to work. During the previous summer he had earned seven dollars a week “melting seals,” and he was now employed at the same work on Saturdays. The family history was positive. The school social worker reported that David’s father was an epileptic, and had a past history of intemperance; an older sister had been in the fifth grade when she left school at fourteen years of age; a fifteenyear-old brother was in the fifth grade; another older sister had been diagnosed at the clinic as an epileptic, low grade imbecile; a sevenyear-old sister was reported as being unable to walk or talk. David had been wearing glasses for four years; his eyes were refitted annually.
Mentally his defects were numerous. Psychological tests showed his distribution of attention, his associability and his discrimination to be only fair. His auditory and visual imageability, his trainability and retentivity were extremely poor. His visual motor memory span was seven; his auditory motor memory span was five.
David was stimulated by an intense desire to read. “I want to learn to read he pleaded every half hour, nor did this desire abate as time went on. He had a reading vocabulary of just seven words? the, boy, and, a, little, to, and go. He recognized all of the letters of the alphabet except x, q, j, and z. these he learned after two drills upon them. In phonetics he recognized seven elemental sounds and two phonogram family words, at and an. However, in the pronunciation of new words he was unable to use even these few mechanics. He understood the fundamental processes in arithmetic, but he was unable to apply them in solving new problems. In penmanship he.scored as high as the median for the sixth grade. He could not spell at all, he saw no reason for differentiating the spelling of unfamiliar words; he might spell either ran or began “b-e-a-n”. His grade teacher’s complaint that he had learned next to nothing was justified; after seven years and a half of regular school attendance, the above made up the sum total of his intellectual attainments. David’s conduct and attendance at the clinic were exemplary. His home was three-quarters of an hour’s ride from the clinic, and he had to change cars twice every morning, yet he never failed to reach the clinic on time or to be enthusiastic over the day’s lesson. Voluntarily he made it his business to lay out the materials and get everything in readiness for work before his clinic teacher arrived. He became much attached to the people who worked with him,*and even after his dismissal from the clinic continued to make occasional calls.
Shortly after he started reporting at the clinic for observation and teaching he was sent back to his oculist for a re-examination of his eyes. The subsequent report was that he was far-sighted and cross-eyed with his eyes drawn outward. The glasses with which his eyes were refitted corrected his vision to one-fifth normal for the right and nine-tenths normal for the left. The prognosis was that his vision would probably remain the same. Evidently, he had been and will continue to be badly handicapped by limited vision. The oculist recommended that David’s hours for close school work be reduced to three hours daily and that all home or night work be eliminated for a period of one year; at the end of that time he was to return for a re-examination. Consequently, David dropped regular school work and reported for clinic teaching only; the rest of the day was to be spent out of doors. He continued to complain a great deal about his eyes, and after a half hour of study his eyes watered and he complained of feeling sick. An investigation showed that he was working in a dental factory from one o’clock to five every day; he polished bridges of false teeth. He said that he gave the money he earned, five dollars a week, to his mother and she in turn supplied him with carfare and lunch money?his usual lunch was pie, cake and coffee. He was persuaded to give up this position because of the eye strain involved; he took a half-time position as errand boy at four dollars and a half a week. Here, he said, he carried his lunch from home and made coffee for himself because “restaurant cooking made him sick”. After these adjustments had been made he continued to complain of his eyes hurting him, and frequently after a half hour’s work they watered so that the lesson would have to be discontinued for the day.
David was under observation for twenty-three hours. During this time he was drilled upon one hundred fifty-seven words as they were needed for his reading vocabulary. He was taught twenty elemental sounds in phonics, ten family words, such as, an, it and ill; he was soon able to analyze words when they were arranged in phonetic groups. At the end of this period he was exposed to the entire reading vocabulary list; he recognized sixty of these one hundred and fifty-seven words at sight, fifty-five by first spelling the word or starting to spell it; he failed to recognize the remaining fifty. During this test he made no attempt to use his knowledge of phonetics. He was a word reader always; even after he knew a story “by heart” he read it word by word, slowly spelling out the letters before he pronounced the words.
The second story which David read, “The Story of the Little Red Hen” (Winston Primer, pp. 1-9), contained twenty-one new words and eleven familiar words. He recognized all of the words before he read the story. The story was read three times; after the third reading he reproduced it as follows:
Story. Reproduction. The Little Red Hen found some wheat. The Little Red Hen sez to the cat, She called the cat. “Will you help me to grow the grass?” She called the goose. Little goose? She called the pig. Then she sez, The Little Red Hen said, “Will you help me, little pig?” “Who will help me plant the wheat?” All answered “Not me.” “Not I,” said the cat. The Little Red Hen sez, “Not I,” said the goose. “I will grow it myself.” “Not I,” said the pig. Then the Little Red Hen did it. “Then I will plant the wheat,” said The Little Red Hen sez to the cat, the Little Red Hen. “Will you help me to cut down my And she did. wheat?” said to the and all of them The wheat grew up. answered. The Little Red Hen said, “Not me,” said the cat. <’Who will help me cut the wheat?” “Not me,” said the goose. ?’Not I,” said the cat. “Not me,” said the pig,” etc. /Not I,” said the goose. /Not I,” said the pig,” etc.
The first word drill exercise was followed by a written spelling test of the ten words which he had just learned to recognize by spelling them over many, many times. He spelled four correctly, namely, he, eat, home, and cry. No drill had been given upon the spelling of these words except as he spelled them orally in order to recognize them in reading. Any word that he could not spell he wrote, “b-e-a-n”. As he learned to pronounce the words by spelling them aloud over and over, some of the kinaesthetic and auditory imagery thus built up seemed to carry over into spelling, for a time at least. In this way he learned to spell four more of the original ten words correctly. Two weeks after he had learned to spell eight of the ten words correctly the list was again dictated, and he again spelled correctly the words which he had spelled correctly the first time, but he failed to spell any additional words correctly. After he learned to spell words he was unable to make use of his knowledge in writing sentences; i. e., he spelled goat and do correctly in both oral and written dictation, but in sentence dictation he spelled them as follows:
Sentences Dictated. Written Reproduction. Two Weeks Later. I have a goat. I got a goat. I han a gate. I do not cry. I no not cry. I no no cry. 186 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. His oral spelling was always superior to his written; he would spell upset correctly, and immediately afterwards write it c-u-p-e-r. He made no use of his knowledge of phonetics in spelling words. The little proficiency he acquired seemed due to the memorial kinaesthethic and auditory images, which he had built up during word recognition drills; he seemed unable to transcribe these auditory motor images into graphic form. In order to aid him in this graphic transcription, he was first made to spell orally; he spelled and then he wrote a family word, followed by all the words that could be built up with it by using consonant sounds and blends. He spelled and then wrote it, mit, pit, hit, spit. He soon learned to spell these words correctly when they were dictated in their series, but as soon as the series were interchanged he wrote them as follows:
eat at it eeat at et hit peat meat sate fit feat fat flat mat neat neat nrt vat tat As a result of the psychological tests and the diagnostic teaching David was diagnosed feebleminded on an intellectual scale. He was crippled physically and mentally. His poor retentivity prevented his keeping what his motor imagery permitted him to absorb. In all probability he will never be able to do more than spell out simple street signs. He gives promise of conforming socially, and will probably be able to earn his living by some simple manual occupation. Certainly the time he spends in a regular grade at school will yield but meager returns both for him and for the school. Edwin: Case No. 3488 Edwin, a husk}’, active, eleven-year-old boy was brought to the Psychological Clinic for examination because he could not read. He had been promoted to the fourth grade by the grace of a kindhearted teacher, not because he could do the work. He did not know the letters of the alphabet, nor their elemental sounds; he recognized two words, boy and have, but wrote them bog and af. He performed the psychological tests unusually well and showed a high degree of competency in solving new problems; he showed good discrimination, distribution of attention and co-ordination. Upon his first trial he did the formboard in twenty-six seconds; upon his third trial he reduced the time to fifteen seconds; he did the cylinders in sixty seconds the first time and in forty-five seconds the second time; he did Healy A twice in twelve seconds. He said, “If bread costs twelve cents a loaf, four loaves will cost forty-eight cents. If I bought a dozen apples at a cent apiece and gave the storekeeper twenty-five cents, I would get thirteen cents in change.” In the above and other tests he showed no lack of ability to do regular school work. His I. Q. was 94.
Edwin was diagnosed as normal with a pedagogical retardation of a specific character. The examining psychologist suggested that a careful examination of his eyes might reveal the cause; the oculist’s subsequent report showed that Edwin was suffering from compound hypermetropic astigmatism; he was fitted with glasses and two weeks later reported to the clinic for observation and clinic teaching. In the clinic Edwin showed good trainability in phonics and reading. He was dismissed with the recommendation that he be given individual instruction in reading with special emphasis upon phonics. When Edwin returned to school he had, in addition to his regular class room work, a competent grade teacher who gave him individual reading lessons for an hour each day. Six weeks after his return to school he came back to the clinic to report his progress. His reading was remarkably improved; he read a story in the Winston Primer with good expression, and he made no mistakes. He read “Jack and the Beanstalk” with evident enjoyment. His teachers were delighted with his progress. They reported him a “changed boy”; he was no longer idle and mischievous, but met all of their requirements promptly, and was attentive to his school work with the exception of reading, and he was fast acquiring mastery of that. Instead of being a nuisance in school he had become one of their favorite pupils, and gave fair promise of being restored to his proper intellectual and proficiency level.
All that had been needed to make Edwin conform to the school group was the discovery that he had a serious visual defect which glasses would correct. He was four years retarded in reading and the allied subjects because he had been unable to read without severe eye strain which made him irritable, inattentive and “stupid”. John: Case No. 3592 John was brought to the Psychological Clinic because of suspected mental deficiency. He was twelve years old and had not learned to read; his teacher complained of his being “restless, inattentive and quarrelsome”. John entered the first grade at six and had attended regularly; he had “made his grade” each year until he reached the fourth grade. There he had encountered a conscientious teacher who kept him with her for three years. His mother was a frail little woman, unable or unwilling to discipline him at home. John was an enterprising lad and, much to the chagrin of his parents, had insisted upon spending his vacations helping the ice cream vendor sell cones from his wagon.
In the psychological tests John showed good initiative, co-ordination and trainability; in reading he had scant second grade proficiency. He was diagnosed as having normal mentality, and was taken on for clinic teaching in order to find out why he had not learned to read efficiently. He was under observation one hour daily for two weeks: Clinical teaching showed that he knew the mechanics necessary for fourth grade reading; he knew the elemental letter sounds, many of the consonant blends, and the commonest of the irregular family phonograms. He was able to make use of this knowledge in analyzing and pronouncing new words, but he was slovenly and careless in his pronunciation of both old and new words. Often his pronunciations were so slipshod that the story he was reading was scarcely recognizable. He was a “word reader”, that is, he read each story word by word instead of reading thoughts in con: nected phrases and sentences.
According to John, the pupils in his class read one book during the school year. This, then, was the fourth year that he had spent upon one reader. As part of the diagnostic teaching he was given some interesting easy stories, such as, “Jack and the Beanstalk”, “Hop 0’ My Thumb”, and “Aesop’s Fables” (simplified edition). He read these stories haltingly and with many mistakes at first; he corrected the mistakes, however, when his attention was called to them. Soon he was so engrossed in the stories that he overcame his slow word method and read whole phrases and sentences connectedly. He read aloud an hour at a time, pausing only to take breath and to correct his pronunciation when the teacher stopped him. These frequent stops in the midst of an interesting story irritated him considerably, and in self defense he became more observant of correct pronunciations. At the end of two weeks he averaged not more than two mispronounced words to a page. Often his imagination led him on faster than he could read the words of the book, and he interposed ideas and sentences of his own. The climax was reached when John rushed to the clinic one morning and proudly announced that he had drawn his first book from the Public Library the night before. It was a one-syllable edition of “Robinson Crusoe”, and he had read it all to his father.
At the end of two weeks John was dismissed from the clinic with the recommendation that he be tutored in reading, and that special attention be given to having the material interesting; as soon as he could be brought up to the fourth grade proficiencv level, he was to be returned to his regular class. Several things happened to prevent the social worker from carrying out this recommendation, and John returned to his regular grade with no outside training except what he had received at the clinic. Six weeks later his teacher reported that his entire attitude towards his school work was changed; his brief clinical training has so influenced him that he was now doing satisfactory work, and she no longer wished to have him leave her grade. John was a victim of “too little to do”. Instead of reading one reader in four years he should have been reading two or three dozen readers a year?readers that told about bears, and giants, and Indians. He had failed to make efficient use of the mechanics which he had acquired because the material given him had not seemed sufficiently interesting to make reading worth the effort.
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