A comparative study of educational techniques alone and in combination with delacato techniques with children having reading and spelling difficulties

Booth, Victor Hubert Alexander (1988) A comparative study of educational techniques alone and in combination with delacato techniques with children having reading and spelling difficulties. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

This thesis stems from the wish of the Local Education Authority to have a university-linked validation exercise to assess the worth of a developmental approach to remedial work with children handicapped by disability in reading and spelling. A longitudinal study was undertaken which looked at the performance of 100 children. All met criteria of intelligence and of lag of educational attainment behind chronological age. Those criteria were W.I.G.C.-R I.Q of at least 90, and educational attainment in lag behind chronological age by at least 20%. All children were given the same four-morning introductory workshop course at which their parents were present and, when possible, their school teachers. Delivery of the workshop was to children in groups of ten, but the last workshop catered for fourteen children to insure against the withdrawal of any children from the research project. Following the workshop a year's help was offered. An S.L.D. team teacher spent one hour per week for twelve months with each child. Parents were invited/expected to be present during that hour and to undertake daily work with their children to complement the S.L.D. teacher's weekly visit. Fifty of the children followed a programme of Delacato exercises before moving to an educational programme, and the other fifty had a wholly educational programme. Comparisons of the educational progress of ill co-ordinated and of well co-ordinated children were made with regard to each programme. From this basic experimental study the research project was broadened to look at a number of concomitant factors and a process analysis was undertaken. The main features of the thesis design are the manner in which the day-to-day work of the Authority's S.L.D. team was used as the experimental field, and the parents brought in to be an important element in the teaching situation. Teachers' industrial action militated against effective school teachers' participation and this was reflected in the partial nature of the inter-personal relationships which could be studied. The research gave grounds for developing a theory that a benign climate, created by parents and teachers interested in the child's remediation and confident that it would be achieved, was of fundamental importance in its influence on the outcome of whichever method of treatment was used. There was no significant difference in long term gains made by children on the wholly educational method and those on the mixed method which incorporated Delacato exercises. It is argued that the research was biased against the success of the mixed programme and that that fact and the additional possibility of other developmental methods being equally or more successful than Delacato exercises suggest that such methods warrant further investigation.

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