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Fifty-eight reading disabled children referred to a medical clinic for developmentally disabled children were examined on admission and after 3 to 5 years of special educational intervention. As a group, the children showed minimal gains in reading, remaining among the poorest readers for age. However, one-third of the children (mainly the older ones) made sufficient progress which, while slowly achieved, resulted in a minimal degree of functional reading. A high proportion of the children were diagnosed as having neurologic and/or psychiatric disorders which were unrelated to the level of reading failure found within the group. The findings suggested that such children are not representative of the general population of poor readers in the community and that throughout their schooling they require special educational methods, other than reading, for the acquisition of subject matter.

The study attempted to determine whether some poor school achievers are deficient in planning and organizing skills. The tasks used were designed to yield equivalent and high success rates by 20 failing and 20 adequate or better (control) second-grade children so that the children's method of approach to the tasks could be examined independently of available skills and effects of failure on performance. The results suggested that: I) many children who are seriously failing in the early years are inefficient or poor task planners and organizers, often remaining fixed on a given approach; 2) this characteristic may be related to lagging or deficient language skills but not to spatial organizing skills; 3) school failure may result from specific cognitive deficiencies and/or failure to effectively organize available cognitive skills. The discussion considered planning and organizing in relation to set, spatial organization, language, memory and attention.