How Adequate Is The Concept of Perceptual Deficit for Education?

Abstract

This study was prompted by concern as to the validity of current procedures for identifying the perceptually deficient child, for providing him training in perceptual skills and for understanding the concept of perceptual deficiency. Seventy children (41 boys, 29 girls) of kindergarten age from the lower socioeconomic classes were studied. Thirty-five children were administered the Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test and were then required to perform a discrimination task using these same forms. For the other 35 subjects, these tasks were performed in reverse order. Results showed that performance on one task was not related to performance on the other. It was possible for a child to discriminate forms well and still obtain a score on the Bender which indicated “perceptual” difficulties and vice versa. It would be highly questionable to subject a child, labeled as having perceptual problems, to remedial tasks requiring visual discrimination in the service of perceptual training if, in fact, he can perform this kind of task quite well. The authors discuss both the validity and the educational usefulness of perceptual deficit as a global concept and suggest that labeling of this kind may impede our understanding of the child's problem.

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