Learning Rate and Retention in Retarded Readers

Abstract

The relationship between rate of learning and long-term retention was studied in 46 children with severe reading disability who were receiving individual tutoring in reading. The majority of individual learning curves showed a characteristic pattern of initial acceleration followed by gradual deceleration. There was very little change in rank order after the sixth lesson at each level of difficulty. The majority of these children showed learning curves qualitatively similar to normal children. Rank order correlations between learning rate and three measures of retention ranged between .54 to .94. Since individual differences in retention have been shown to be a function of degree of learning, these results suggest that learning rate could be used as a basis for determining degree of original learning.

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