A Follow-Up Study of Non-Readers

Educational practice has tended to treat the non-reader3 as a child possessing a specific disability which may, or may not, be conditioned by emotional, mental, or physical maladjustment (7). With the reading diffi culty corrected, the assumption has been made that the child will then progress without further marked difficulty in his educational career. The findings of this study question this comfortable assumption through a follow-up record of 33 non-reading boys. They suggest that, in the majority of cases, non-reading may be merely the original expression of the child's inability to respond adequately to the average classroom instruction. It is our purpose to follow the educational career of these 33 boys through the eight elementary school grades in order to determine: (1) the extent of educational assistance needed to remedy the original reading defect, (2) the amount and type of additional educational aid required, (3) the emotional maladjustments present when non-reading lessons began, and (4) the relation between these maladjustments and the need for additional educational aid. the group defined