Studies in Diagnostic Teaching I Albert
- Author:
Edward Watson and Arthur Phillips,
Clinic Teacher, University of Pennsylvania
If yon were to talk to Albert for a short time and hear him tell of his toys or his games with his friends, or of his trip to Cuba you would probably say, ‘’ Here is a superior child or at least a boy who is better than average.” Or if you were to judge him by his appearance and general manner you would probably say that he was a normal boy of ten with a pleasing personality and winning ways. Hence it is not at all strange that the principal of Albert’s school, when he saw the boy in a B division class, a class for slow moving and retarded children, wondered why he was there, and sent him to the Psychological Clinic to see if he could be placed with average children.
Albert was first examined on July 20, 1928. At that time he was eight years and eleven months old, but was at the median for ten year old boys in weight and height.
His school history showed that he entered school at the age of six and never repeated a grade but had been placed in the slow moving division. At the present time he is completing the fourth grade. His conduct in school is fair, outside of the fact that he talks a good deal and often refuses to work.
The medical history shows that he had measles, mumps, chicken pox, bronchitis, influenza, congested kidneys and one accident causing a concussion of the brain. None of these diseases, however, affected him permanently. He walked at eighteen months, talked at three years and is still enuretic.
His psychological examination showed him to be inferior in all the performance tests and in memory span. His audito-vocal memory span was five forward and four reverse, and his visual span six. His Intelligence Quotient was 93.
Albert’s results in the psychological tests and his I.Q. nevertheless point to normal mentality. The case became complex only when an attempt was made to determine the boy’s school proficiency. At the time of the examination he had successfully completed three years of school work; yet when he was given a reading test, it was found that he could not read a single word. When he tried to read he read backwards or started from the second syllable of the word. Although he could not read at all he could spell most of the words in the first reader. He could recognize the letters, he knew the spelling of the words, yet because of his complete lack of any idea of phonetics, he could not read the simplest words. His arithmetic was also poor. He could do only problems requiring not more than 2B competency. One wonders how a boy with such poor school proficiency could ever have completed three years of school work.
The examiner, on finding these results, recommended that Albert be taught at the clinic in order to determine the cause of his failure to learn to read.
Although the teaching of Albert proved a difficult task it was much simpler than was expected. He learned rapidly and by the end of the first five months of teaching he had read seventy-four Pages in a primer. This is the usual amount of work covered in grammar school during the first year. His teacher used the phonetic method and built up new words in families. Not only did she teach the boy the elements of reading but also succeeded in improving his attention and creating within him an interest in reading. At this point I took up the teaching duties. At this time, also, Albert’s school teacher requested that the boy be taught arithmetic along with reading. I spent three hours a week with Albert and divided the time equally between the two subjects. In the beginning I continued the methods of Albert’s first teacher. He grasped the new words quickly and recognized them when he came across them in the text. Several difficulties, however, soon presented themselves. Although Albert quickly learned new words when they were taught to him, he could rarely ever put together a new word which he encountered while reading. Often when he did try to read a new word, he started from the end and tried to read it in reversed order.
During this time I had been building up new words by the family method using word cards or writing lists of words on the board. After a short time, however, I noticed that although Albert Was reading these new words correctly, he was actually reading them backwards. He found that the last syllables of all of the words were the same and all he had to do was to read the first syllable. Accordingly he said the last syllable first to himself, then tried to tack on to it the first syllable and when the whole word was finished he would say it aloud. Sometimes, however, he would forget himself and say the last syllable first. For example, suppose we were taking the ‘’ ake’’ family. I would write on the board the syllable “ake” then prefix to it “c” forming “cake” or “r” forming “rake” or “sn” forming “snake” and so on. Albert would soon discover that in all these words the “ake” was the same. When I asked him to read one of the words, he would say to himself “ake,” “sn,” “sn,” then aloud “snake.” Sometimes, however, he said to himself “ake,” “er,” “er,” then aloud “aker” instead of “rake.” It was easy to observe these processes within Albert because he always moves his lips and talks to himself when he tries to form a new word.
Thinking that this mental process contributed largely to Albert’s reversed reading, I discontinued the use of the word cards and the family method. Instead I used the method of forming lists of words whose beginnings were the same. I also made a list each day of the new words in Albert’s lesson. After the lesson was over I would have him reread these words then take them home and study their pronunciation and spelling. In this way Albert learned from ten to twenty new words a day. “Whenever he came across a new word in the book I put my finger over the last syllables and had him read the word syllable by syllable in the proper order. The results of this method were most gratifying. After a short time Albert acquired the habit of reading from the left side of a word to the right. He soon forgot the family method and when he encountered a new word he looked first at the first syllable and figured out the word in its proper order.
From this point on, his reading ability developed most rapidly. At the beginning of the term he read at a rate of five to six pages per hour in a primer. At the end of three months he was able to read twenty-two pages per hour in a second reader.
Only one obstacle yet remains in Albert’s reading ability and that is his attention. When there is a picture on the page he will not read until he has examined the picture and explained it. Once he is allowed to do this, he continues to turn the pages and look at all the pictures in the book. If he is permitted to do this, he turns pages until the book is finished and then puts it away without going back to the reading. If, while reading, something in the room attracts his attention, he stops reading and examines the object. Often for no apparent reason at all he gets up and runs around the room or plays with marbles which he always carries with him. Even when he is reading he moves all around and kicks his feet under the chair and plays with his tie or does anything rather than sit still. So distractable was he that it became necessary for me to hold him in his seat. I always put two chairs next to each other and sat at Albert’s side. When he started swinging his feet, I put one of my legs across his knees and made motion of his legs impossible. When he started playing with his tie or with any object within reach, I removed his hands from the object and put them down on the desk. Whenever he stopped reading for any other reason than to figure out a new word, I immediately called his attention to it and made him go back to his work. These measures, however, only served to keep the boy still in the classroom. I do not believe that his attention improved at all. Often he sat still and read for as much as thirty minutes. This, however, was not because his attention had improved, but because he could not have moved even if he had tried.
In most cases when Albert came to a new word he first guessed at it. I never told him he was wrong but instead asked him to read ^ a second time. He would then look at the word more carefully and attempt to figure it out. If I found he could not do so alone, I assisted him by covering part of the word and asking him to read ^ syllable by syllable. Sometimes, however, when I asked him to reread a word he would continue to guess and insist that he was right. At such times, I would write the word syllable by syllable 0n the blackboard and show him where he was wrong. Sometimes he would look at a word and say an entirely different word which meant the same thing. For example, he was told that a troll was a goblin. When he came across the word “troll” in the book, he read it “goblin.” This, however, only occurred with a few words and did not form a serious defect in his reading.
Albert’s distractabilit.y becomes much more serious outside of the classroom. I do not believe that he could read three or four Pages by himself without someone watching him. He would probably skip the hard words and soon find something else outside of the book to interest him. Toward the end of the term I made an attempt to improve this defect. Albert told me that his father often read to him the comics in the Evening Bulletin. Accordingly I brought with me, each day, a copy of that paper and had Albert read the comics himself. I hoped that as soon as he learned the vocabulary he would read them himself at home. This would serve to make reading more interesting to him. As far as the experiment went it seemed successful. Albert became interested in three of the comics. These he read without any urging and in them made an attempt to read the hard words. However there was not enough time for him to acquire a sufficiently large comic vocabulary for me to expect him to be able to read them without assistance and the outcome of the experiment is unknown.
During the term Albert finished reading Barnes’ Primer (about twenty pages), read completely Elson Reader, Book One (160 pages), part of Elson Reader, Book Two (64 pages), part of Bolenius Third Reader (25 pages) and two pages of Spaiding and Bryce Fourth Reader. He had no difficulty at all with the Elson Readers. I had him read completely Book One only to stimulate an interest in reading. Book Two was also easy for him and he read it at about the same speed with which he read the easier book. The third reader was more difficult but he read it at sufficient speed to enjoy the stories told in it. This, however, was not the case with the fourth reader. Here Albert had to stop too often and after he read two pages he could not tell the story. His reading proficiency, therefore, is about 3A.
The arithmetic lessons presented only one problem?attention. Only once during the past school year has Albert received a passing grade in arithmetic. The reason is simple. Albert does not have the ability to stick to a problem until it is finished. In the beginning of the term, I had great difficulty in making him do any kind of a problem at all. He would go to the board and look at the problem and then draw pictures or make lines in any direction. When I called his attention to the problem he would start to guess and always guessed wrong. Nevertheless, no teaching was necessary in the arithmetic lessons. Albert knew the methods of doing any problem requiring fourth grade proficiency. All that was necessary was to keep him at his work.
Albert did not know the multiplication tables very well. However he knew how to get any desired multiplication by adding or subtracting from one he did know. Hence he was constantly doing little problems on the side of the board. In order to correct this, I spent an entire month on short multiplications. Each day I gave him a number of such problems until he was perfectly sure of himself. This made the long problems seem shorter to him and he began to take more interest in them. During the rest of the term I drilled him on fourth grade problems.
I found it necessary to use the same methods of keeping him at his arithmetic as I had used in the reading lessons. Here, however, the method was much more successful and I can definitely say that Albert’s attention, as far as arithmetic is concerned, has noticeably improved. Before the end of the term I could give him a problem in long division, walk out of the room and feel reasonably sure that he would do the problem without an error. Not only was this so at the clinic, but at school where there was no one to hold him down, and on his May report he passed arithmetic for the first time this year.
One year has passed since Albert came to the clinic. During the year one great problem was overcome but a greater problem was brought to light. Albert is no longer a case of orthogenic teaching ?f reading for he is now at a point where the usual methods of teaching may be applied to him. He, however, presents a case of distractability of attention which may prove the greatest deterring factor of his life. The work of teaching Albert has merely been a search for methods of combating this defect and his teachers of the future will succeed only if they find such methods.
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