Correlation coefficients ranging from -.47 to .92 have been reported. 449 450The Journal of Educational Psychology acuity of vision, etc. It depends, finally, upon the purpose for which the reading is done. For example, the reader may wish only to determine in general terms what the material is about. He may seek only to answer certain specific questions, or to locate certain specific facts. On the other hand, he may stop to ponder over the importance or the implication of the ideas presented. He may pause to memorize some of them. He may consider ways in which he can make possible use of these ideas. He may reorganize them to fit them better to his needs. He may think of new questions as he reads and re-read or continue reading with these questions in mind. What he does while he reads depends, then, on the purpose for which he undertook the reading in the first place or upon purposes which develop during the course of the reading. The nature of these purposes is conditioned by his educational background.Whether or not one considers all of these acts as a part of the reading process in the technical sense, or whether or not one considers all of the skills and the abilities exercised as reading skills, it must be acknowledged that these acts take place during reading and that a part of the time each individual spends in reading is given over to just such acts. It is apparent, then, that there is no meaningful 'single' reading rate (in words per minute) for any given individual, but that, instead, he reads at many different rates, each specific to a different purpose. It follows also, that for any given group of individuals, the degree of relationship between reading rate and any other variable may depend upon the purpose or purposes for which they read, that this relation will be most meaningful only if they all read for the same purpose, and that, accordingly, there may be many different degrees of relationship, each specific to a different purpose.It is, therefore, essential in a relationship study that the purpose of the reading be very carefully defined and controlled. This means, of course, that the purpose must be set in advance for all readers and must be clearly understood by them. Obviously, many of the purposes suggested above, especially those initiated during the course of the reading, can not be so defined and controlled. Hence, any rate-comprehension relationship study which is to yield meaningful results is limited not only by the fact that it must be based on reading done by a specific * The standard procedure for testing the significance of differences between pairs of related measures was employed (", p. 68f). ( -4.379 (<«t -2.576).

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The Organismic Age concept has had considerable appeal to elementary teachers. Perhaps one reason for this is the fact that its proponents have put it forward in a setting of enlightened school practices. In this paper we are not concerned with these practices but with the validity of the OA concept.Long since accepted is the idea that a child's readiness for reading, arithmetic, third-grade science, and so on is a function of his mental development, total mental development. In this, the MA is the most important single component. But social development, emotional maturity, before-school experiences, language development, motor coordination, and perhaps other factors are also important. The OA is an average of age scores of mental data and age scores of anatomical and physiological data, which hereafter we shall call physical data. Commonly, OA is the average of mental age, reading age, dental age, grip age, metacarpal age, vital capacity age, height age, and weight age, although there is no hard and fast set of component measures. In a sense it combines measures of what is commonly called mental growth and measures of whatwe may call physical growth; and, because of the disproportionate number of measures of the latter kind, the average, OA, is weighted heavily in that direction. It is with the feasibility in school practice of making prediction of achievement, determining readiness, appraising achievement of pupils in terms of their anatomical and physiological development, as well as in terms of measures of mental development that we are concerned. Can we make better predictions or interpretations (which amounts to the same thing) by so doing?Obviously the first questions one would ask in this connection are: Are measures of physical growth related (1) to mental growth, and (2) to academic achievement? Moreover, if found to be related, are they related to an extent that makes any practical difference?They are, of course, related in a spurious way. All the measures that go into OA are related one to another in this way. Any growth process requires time. Childhood is the period of growth. Most of the growth functions begin in early childhood, even before birth,

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