Some Modifications in the Teaching of the Three R’s to M.D. Children
- Author:
Kennedy-Fraser, M. A., B.Sc.
(Lecturer in Mental Deficiency under the Scottish National Committeefor the Trainlng of Teachers and Psychologist to the Glasgow Education Authority.) What follows is a preliminary account of a co-operative experiment in the teaching of M.D. children by the students who attended the first course for the training of teachers of mentally defective children, organised by the National pommittee for the Training of teachers for Scotland at their Glasgow Centre in conjunction with the Glasgow Education Authority.
The underlying general principles were worked out on the basis of observations of many different types of teaching both in England and Scotland, combined with a few initial trials and a considerable amount of discussion of the psychological basis for such a modification. The practical details are only now being worked ?ut by the students in their own schools, and further changes which are found to be necessary are being passed round the group.
The basis of change is not so much one of method as one of motive or incentive and as it is probably best illustrated in the case of reading, we shall deal with that in the greatest detail.
In the first plae it must be made clear that we are considering the limited class of M.D. children, who are usually classified as educable. But since this term is used in such a variety of ways it might be safer to give the limits of the group in terms of Intelligence Quotient (I. Q.) and to say that we include children with I. Q. s from about 50 up to somewhere between 70 and 75.
If we consider the various possible motives which arouse and maintain the desire to learn to read amongst normal children, we find among others the four following types in order from the highest to the lowest;
appreciation of literary style.
appreciation of content either for information or amusement.
as an alternative to speech as a means of communicating directions or instructions.
(d) as an association of the correct sound to a given visual symbol or group of symbols (sometimes on a guessing or perhaps a memory basis).
Unless definite measures are taken to counteract it, M.D. children are as a rule confined to the last of the above alternatives. Among the reasons why this tendency should be more pronounced with defectives than with normal children are the following. In the first place the M.D. develops at a much slower rate and this is markedly so in the case of language as shown by vocabulary, and as a result the M.D. may not even know the word for which the visual symbols stand.
In the second place he is not so accustomed as the normal child to see reading used in his home for the purpose of obtaining information or amusement and thus it may never occur to him that there is any other reason for learning to read except that the teacher seems to expect it. For this reason it might be a good thing for a teacher occasionally to read aloud an interesting story, partly for the story itself but even more so as a practical and concrete illustration of the fact that the capacity to read may lead to something better than mere success in the mechanics of reading. In the third place the rate of progress of the normal child is so much more rapid that the factor of novelty, which is always a very strong incentive to learning, may last long enough to get the child over the initial mechanical stages and bring it to the stage where it begins to read more for the content than for the mechanical association, with the result that one of the higher incentives automatically comes into action, even if it has not been effective from the very beginning. With the M.D. this stage comes so very much later that the effect of the encouragement derived thereform and the consequent undoubted increase in the rate of learning does not appear.
Before going on to describe the changes suggested let us try to give a psychological description of the child’s probable attitude to the reading lesson at the lowest level in terms of situation and response, with the further working of what Thorndike calls the Law of Effect. This law of learning states that if a reaction to a given situation leads to satisfaction it tends to be repeated on a future occasion but if it leads to annoyance it tends to be avoided. Thus the situation at the stage of the mastery of the mechanical details of reading consists of a set of more or less mysterious visual symbols which are said by the teacher to stand for some word or words. by any means?legitimate recognition on the basis oi familiarity, successful guessing, or even memorisation of the passage to be read through constant repetition round the class?the child manages to give orally the expected words then the interview with the teacher is likely to be short and pleasant and to lead to a feeling of satisfaction. If on the other hand the wrong word or no word at all is forthcoming then the interview with the teacher is likely to be much longer and not at all so pleasant. Under ceitain circumstances this may be the only incentive to learning.
Another factor which is apt to be very strong with certain M.D. children is that of inhibition; i.e., it is often not so much a case of cannot as one of will not. This is frequently the case in connection with speech, where a child will absolutely refuse to speak to relative strangers such as the teacher while at the same time it is quite able to speak to the family at home. In some cases this is brought on by a cumulative action of a succession of failures to read, etc., with the resulting suggestion of permanent incapacity. Of course if to this indirect form o suggestion is added the direct form of remarks by an unsympathetic teacher or one who, in handling a large class of ordinary children, has not time to realise that this particular child is M.D. or even realising it has not the opportunity to apply special teaching, then the state of affairs is even worse a e relatively late stage in development at which the child may have come in o he hands of a special class teacher..
The problem before us is thus how to introduce the second lowest motive to learning to read in place of the lowest. Two simple class experiments will firs be described to show the state of affairs that is apt to exist. In one case a class of M.D. children was given a set of individual cards on which were written some very simple instructions well within the vocabulary and capacity of performance of the class, and they were in addition given the simple ora instruc ion ea this and do what it tells you to do.’’ At first all the children made one or bo h of the two following responses. They either read their own card aloud, indee very much aloud, or they took out their jotters and proceeded to copy out the writing on the card. When this was finished, they sat back apparently qui satisfied. At this stage the teacher again said ‘ ‘But I want you to do what it tells you to do.’’ Then and only then one could notice a gradual dawning of the idea in the case of the brighter children and an attempt to cairy out e ins 1 , until before the end of the lesson, most but by no means all of thc ^ren were attempting to follow their written instructions. Another experiment i clearly that fluency and comprehension do not necessari y correspon . case the student began the day by telling the children al^ff7sting^r^rV^^ definite and obvious succession of events in it. Somewhat later in the fore:aoo she handed out a series of cards, on which the separate sec ions o ? . were written, to a group of girls who were at that stage m their reading. 8 to the unexpected absence of one of the girls in this group one g^ had to have two cards, and these were given to the girl who was known to be the mostjfluent mechanical reader in the group. The girls were then asked to read silently their own card or cards and then the one who had the beginning of the story wa read her card first and so oq in order. Some of the girls managed fairly well with a mimimum of prompting, but the most fluent reader seemed entirely at a loss, and finally when the turn came for one of her cards to be read, she was prompted by her neighbour, who by the way was not nearly so good a reader in the mechanical sense, and then to our surprise she began to read, not the card which came at that point in the story, but one that came much later. These results served to confirm what had previously been a very strong suspicion in our minds and we resolved to try and devise some method which would tendto obviate such a state of affairs. In choosing our particular mode of attack we were further influenced by the fact that the great variability which is bound to occur in a class of M.D. children, no matter how carefully we may grade them, clearly indicates that the individual method is the one which is most especially adapted to meet the needs of a special class. In order that this method may be carried out with the maximum of efficiency, particularly with older children, some means has to be found to supplement oral instructions. Thus both from the point of view of reading itself and from the general orgai isation of the class on the basis of individual work it seemed advisable to devise some system of written instructions for each individual child, or in some cases for the class as a whole.
One final factor which was taken into consideration was that it is often possible for one to do something as a means to an end, which has hitherto proved impossible as an end in itself. For example the writer of this article was for a long time unable to compel himself to open his eyes under water, when he desired to bathe them, but one day in a swimming bath when diving for three discs which he hoped to find by groping for them with his eyes shut he failed to reach the third one and before he knew it he found himself looking for it with his eyes open. Since then he has been quite able to open his eyes at will under water. Is it not possible that the inhibition of the M.D. child might be overcome in a similar way, and once overcome no longer continue to handicap him in his further efforts to learn. The present form in which we are trying to meet these conditions is as follows.
The morning program of a class is sometimes arranged in a different way. After the necessary preliminary arrangements and exercises each child is given a card on which are written out the various tasks which he is expected to perform in the course of the morning. These usually include tasks in reading, writing, arithmetic and simple desk-manual work at the stage suited to the individual child’s capacity in these different subjects. Very frequently the last task suggested is to do what you would like best when finished with all the others. In this connection it is very interesting to note that the child will often undertake something which the teacher would have hesitated to prescribe at the end of the morning because of its known difficulty for the given child. As an indication of the way in which a class, which has so far been used to the more orthodox methods, will react to this change one case may be described. A group of nineteen M.D. children at a one-class centre, at very varied stages, were given the new method.
With one very low-grade exception they could all read a little, and some fairly well. On the third day of the new method the writer visited the class and made the following observations. At the beginning of the forenoon eighteen cards were handed out to those children who could read, each with a set of four different tasks suited to their individual capacities. In the first place all without exception read B hr ,Carc^S a^OU(3 and for the moment the result was a miniature representation of w’iV f; “^en some of them proceeded to copy out what they had just read, but V? ^eei^ m^nu^es sixteen of the eighteen children were hard at work carrying ?u heir individual tasks. The two boys who did not respond at first were of the es ess noisy kind, but the feeling of the rest of the class that such noise was a is urbing factor, combined with the fact that the teacher deliberately ignored em as non-productive members of the class was already beginning to influence em and they were ultimately making an attempt to do something. In the ,ew cases where the child believed himself unable to read what he had been given e was allowed to go and ask one of the better readers what was on his card. As ?ng as such co-operation does not amount to the cleverer child doing all the work or he duller one it ought to be encouraged. Then as each child claimed to have successfully completed one of the tasks on his card he asked the teacher to come and see^at he had done and if the result was satisfactory he received some easily v*sible mark and proceeded to his next task. The one child who could not read was given oral instructions to do something within her powers. The result was a most the whole class was working away happily at some congenial task, and was easy to see that the very fact that each one had a special card for himself a greater feeling of pride and responsibility towards his alloted task. It r r settled one question which was frequently raised during the preliminary eoretical discussion of the proposal. Would M.D. children have enough *>i lative to respond to this method of assignment? This question was asked ky some of the students who had already had experience with M.D. f tifreQ ? results sh?w clearly that if the tasks are chosen within the capacity in t )C*V^ren they are quite capable of responding, and indeed this very response th 1 S6 ? *S a nios^ valuable type of training in the intelligent use of what capacities f H-ifk*^ren d? possess. One school in a Scottish institution is going even th ^6r an(^ aPP^ng a Sub-Dalton plan with oral directions and special rooms for e different subjects and is meeting with a surprising response from the pupils.
The method as outlined above is adapted to the needs of the older pupils in a pecial school but the following may suggest ways in which the method may be apted to beginners’ needs. At the stage where the chief work of the children ay be with occupational material in order to lay the concrete basis for vocabulary ^ number work a beginning may be made with the use of reading as a means of giving instructions. Thus for example where there are various kinds of concrete a erial such as beads, sticks, etc., cards may be written with the name of these ^ Jects on them and at the stage when the children know what they are expected to o with the different types of material they can be set to work in the morning by aving cards handed to them with the name of the material they are to use and en left to fetch their own materials. At first it would be as well to have the ch?r?S materiaIs on labels over the place where they were kept so that the id could use the method of comparing the written names wherever he was unas to the meaning of the symbol. When a number of names was learned ?tc colour names could be added and the children asked to use blue beads, c* Here again there should be a simple dictionary available in the form of a table of colours on the wall with their names beside them. At a later stage the children might be given cards which said for example ‘ ‘String 3 blue beads and 2 white beads’’ and the like.
One method of saving undue requirements in the way of learning is to confine the alphabets to two, printed capitals and small script letters, in order to require the children to read and write the same symbols. If there are not reading books available in the required alphabets then let the children in one class make the readers for the children in a lower class.
With regard to other features in the curriculum, a few random suggestions must suffice in the meantime. In cases where there is a marked difficulty in learning to read in spite of the above variation of incentive, an attempt should be made with the word-tracing method outlined by Miss Grace Fernald in the last chapter of “Intelligence Tests and School Re-organisation*’ (Harrop) by Terman and others. This is for children who remember better graphically than visually or orally.
Spelling should not be taught orally but in writing, since that is the place in after life where a deficiency is most to be noted. It stands to reason if a child is at the stage where he is likely to confuse b and d in writing them, he is not necessarily learning the correct way of writing dog when he spells it orally as d-o-g and may all the time by visualising bay or something else. Again if writing is being done for the purpose of spelling, too much stress ought not to be laid on the copper-plate nature of the writing, but an attempt ought rather to be made to get as many correct repetitions of the word in the short time available with a certain minimum of legibility. Further it is better to secure the correct spelling of a few of the more frequent words than to try to attain to the correct spelling of a large number of words or to devote or rather waste time in the attempt to work on the peculiarly difficult words which are sometimes known as ‘spelling demons.’ Lists are now available of the relative frequency of the commonest words in our language and also of the degree of their spelling difficulty as measured by the frequency of actual errors made by children in attempting to spell them.
With regard to arithmetic an actual case will illustrate very clearly one of the dangers to be avoided. A boy in one of the special schools in Glasgow had an interesting history in arithmetic. At the beginning he was very slow in learning addition, but as the result of prolonged and patient efforts on the part of his teacher he at last reached a fairly satisfactory degree of readiness and accuracy in addition, and was then being taken gradually on into multiplication with the result that not only was he unable to learn multiplication but his hard-won mastery of addition seemed to be entirely lost and his teacher was in despair about him. The probable explanation of his case was that at the beginning of his school career in an ordinary infant school with very big classes he had not had the preliminary concrete experience of number that the other children had had owing to the later development of what might be termed loosely his number sense, and that he had been forced to build up a system of addition on an insufficient basis of number knowledge and had resorted to memory to replace understanding, with the result that after a time he found that the answer 10 to the question 0 and 4 was considered satisfactory and met with approval. Thus it tended to become stamped in as the correct response to that situation without a real appreciation of the reason. Then suddenly a tragic day dawned when the answer was no longer inevitably 10, but sometimes for no conceivable reason became 24, and the bottom went out of this boy’s arithmetical universe and he became completely at a loss. It is becoming increasingly clearer that number is not purely a matter of training but that we have to wait for a stage in the development or ripening of the child s mind where he is prepared to appreciate number and that formal training in addition, etc., before that stage is reached is worse than useless. It is probable that the slowness in general mental development of the M.D. brings with it a corresponding slowness in the specific number development, although this will require to be made the subject of special investigation before any final conclusions are laid down regarding it.
Finally it is to be hoped that it is clearly understood that the foregoing is merely a preliminary survey of the work of a group interested in the best ways o teaching the M.D. and that suggestions for its further modification will be welcomed from those who are in a position to give it a really practical trial.
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