The Measurement of Perceptual‐motor Abilities of Head Start Children

Abstract

A battery of perceptual and perceptual-motor integrative tasks was developed and administered to a group of economically disadvantaged children enrolled in Head Start classes. The battery, which included widely used as well as newly developed instruments, was designed to conform to a model which conceived of the skills leading to complex cognitive functions as being hierarchical in nature. Performance data and interrelationships are presented for all measures and comparisons made with studies of middle class children wherever possible. The results indicated little deficit for the study group in the basic perceptual and gross perceptual-motor skills, but a marked deficit in the more complex integrative skills. The appropriateness of the measures for disadvantaged populations is discussed. THE MEASUREMENT OF PERCEPTuAL-MOTOR ABILITIES OF HEAD START CHILDREN George Gordon Educational Testing Service andIrwin Hyman Temple UniversityRecent years have seen a rapidly expanding interest in the early educational development of economically impoverished children. As a result of this interest, numerous programs for dealing with the problems of these children have been proposed. However, the production of such programs has been impeded by the lack of available data and instrumentation appropriate to this group. A number of evaluation and research studies related to Head Start programs (Alexander, 1967;Beller, 1968;M. Deutsch, 1967;Grotberg, 1969;Hyman & Kliman, 1967) have demonstrated significWlt differences between socioeconomic groups in the skills considered necessary for early school achievement. Many of the tests utilized especially in pre-posttest designs have been familiar and traditional instruments, such as the Stanford-Binet (Terman & Merrill, 1960), the Metropolitan Readiness Test (Hildreth, Griffiths, & McGauvran, 1965), and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn, 1959). However, the standardization groups for these and other frequently employed instruments were drawn primarily from the middle class, and the tests are heavily loaded with language, instructions, and objects familiar to middle but not necessarily to lower class children.The present investigation represents a small part of a much larger study (Educational Testing Service, 1968), which is attempting to describe the characteristics and development of disadvantaged children at preschool and primary grade levels. The early stages of this longitudinal study are focused in large part on pre-academic and social skills, which have, in many instances, been associated with the concept of "school readiness." -2-Current educational and psychological theories rely heavily on the concept of readiness as an important factor in success in the primary grades. While this concept was initially related to requisite academic and social skills, the educational and developmental literature evidences a growing interest in the relationship of school readiness to neurological maturation. Authors such as Lowder (1956), Kephart (1960), Koppitz (1964), Frostig, Masl...