The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of special motor training on a group of grade one pupils who were having difficulty in reading. Ten grade one students were selected from the Sir Richard McBride Elementary School in Vancouver. These pupils were classed as potentially poor readers on the basis of the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test and the Winter Haven Perceptual Copy Forms Test. A matched group of ten pupils, which would act as a control group, was selected from the Annex to the McBride School. The two groups were matched according to age, sex, and the results of the reading readiness s test and the perceptual form test. The experimental group received sixteen weeks of special motor training which was carried on for one hour a day, five days a week. At the completion of the training period all subjects were given the Stanford Achievement Test and the Winter Haven Perceptual Form Test. The differences between the means of the raw scores of the two groups were statistically analyzed. The t-test was used and the t required for significance at the .05 level of confidence was 2.10. The t's obtained indicated a very significant improvement of the experimental group over the control group in reading ability. The following indicated the obtained t on each item of the reading test plus the perceptual form test. 1. Word Meaning 10.38 2. Paragraph Meaning 5.35 3. Spelling 5.83 4. Word Study Skills 4.04 5. Perceptual Form 11.11 There was no significant difference in vocabulary. Because of certain experimental conditions which could not be controlled, it could not definitely be indicated that the improvement was due entirely to the motor skills program. The apparent lack of direct relationship between levels of perceptual ability and reading achievement raises several questions. Further information is needed before the reason for apparent differences between improvement in perceptual and reading skills following a special motor training program can be understood. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of special training in motor ability skills on the reading ability of grade two pupils who have a specific reading disability. Thirty subjects, all of them grade two pupils at the Sir Richard McBride Elementary School in Vancouver, British Columbia, were selected. All were classed as poor readers on the basis of the Metropolitan Reading Achievement Test. The subjects were given pre-trainlng standardized tests in Mental Ability, Reading Achievement, Visual Perception, and General Motor Capacity. They were then randomly assigned to five sub-groups for Special Training purposes. Group I was the control group. Group II received extra instruction in motor skills and reading. Group III were given special training in motor skills. Group IV received extra reading instruction, and Group V received special training in both reading and visual perception. The thirty subjects were equally distributed, six in each group. The experimental groups received approximately fifty minutes of special training every day for a period of sixty-five days. Case Studies were made of the six subjects in Group III, the Motor Ability Group. At the conclusion of the Special Training Period, all subjects were again tested in general motor capacity, visual perception, and reading ability. Initial and final test scores in motor capacity, perception, and reading were analysed by Fisher's t statistic and the differences between mean improvements of the five groups were discussed. Case Study Reports were written for each of the subjects in Group III. A review of the Case Study Reports revealed that all of the subjects in the Motor Ability Group improved in reading ability, visual perception, and motor skills. The group mean scores, before and after training, indicated that children who received special training in motor skills (Group III) improved in reading ability as measured by the Metropolitan Reading Achievement Test, but no more than children in any of the remaining groups. It appears also that special training in motor ability skills can cause an improvement in the motor ability and visual perception of children at this age level. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

This study attempted to clarify the relationship between visuo-spatial abilities and reading achievement at the first and fifth grades. Groups of good and poor readers were selected at each grade level on the basis of student's scores on the Wide Range Achievement Test in Reading. All subjects had obtained an I.Q. score of ninety or better. The sample was composed of twenty-one females and twenty-seven males. Four tests from the Reitan-Indiana Neuropsychological Battery were given to assess visuo-spatial ability. It was hypothesized that visuo-spatial abilities are related positively to reading achievement and that this relationship is approximately equal at the two grade levels. Statistical analyses of results gave partial support to the first hypothesis.

The information processing approach was used as a basis for studying some brief visual memory processes in reading disabled children. Three aspects of processing were examined, viz. (i) Duration of icon persistence; (ii) Performance under different backward masking conditions; and (iii) Processing of information into a more durable short-term visual memory store. It was found that there were no differences in the duration of icon persistence in reading disabled children, but that these children exhibited marked impairment in performance in the tasks used in the latter two experiments. The reasons for the reading disabled children's poorer performance in these tasks were not apparent. Speculations about the strategies used by these children in approaching the tasks are made. Possible implications and directions for future research are discussed. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1980.

This dissertation makes the case that treating digitized corpora of literary works as cognitive artifacts can provide particular insight into how the reading mind apprehends events within an imagined world and, thereby, provide potentially useful functional models for event perception, emotional memory, and determining what’s “real.” Most essentially, it will make the case that the deepest feature of narrative cognition may involve an “information distribution” assessment, wherein the variation of information density over time cues the mind to attend to denser events with increased attention, potentially saving more of their content for long-term memory. This mimics what cognitive research has frequently established for real-world processing of emotionally stimulating events, wherein emotional memory tends to be better retained over time, with more detail, fewer conflations, and more resistance to fading, while neutral events tend to be relegated to gist or forgotten. Put together, this produces an ordering of autobiographical memory that resembles a glimmering string of pearls: densely detailed memories strung together over time, separated by thinner, looser memories and gist, with a particular cluster of these “pearls” towards the middle for the memory bump of the mid-teens to mid-twenties. While many have argued for larger schemas or socially influenced self-regard as the major driver for memory emphasis in one’s Life Story, if autobiographical memory is anything like a novel, it may prove a bit simpler: most of the bigger pearls mark where one’s sensory array “dilated” in moments of arousal, and their lustrous, persistent “shine” may be a matter of how likely it was that one returned to those memories over time. Chapter 1 examines what we do and don’t know about the reading mind, settling on a narrower definition of immersive narrative reading as an exceptional cognitive state which moves in and out of what cognitive psychologists call “flow” and a more passive, vivid “daydream.” This is an inherently unstable activity that requires a great deal of assistance from the text, thereby providing useful targets of analysis for researchers interested in perception, emotion, and memory, with a particular eye towards embodied cognition. It then discusses key gaps in the scientific literature and literary scholarship around event perception and narrative cognition, some of which this project aims to partially fill through quantitative analysis of literary texts. This chapter will also discuss the promise and perils of treating literary corpora like the novels in Project Gutenberg as cognitive artifacts: the known limitations of using “canon” texts as a representative sample of literature in general, the rarity of reading, and what it means to “backsolve” cognition through its artifacts. Chapter 2 describes a series of experiments conducted on a corpus of a few thousand novels and nonfiction narratives contained in Project Gutenberg and the Nickels and Dimes Project. Leaning on the “string of pearls” metaphor for autobiographical memory organization, this chapter will promote a model of long-form narrative’s fundamental mnemonics as something that mimics that organizational pattern: information density that varies over time, predicting not only the pace of in-narrative time passing, but which “moments” or features of the narrative will be important for the reader to remember over multiple reading events, while others will be forgotten or relegated to gist. This pattern closely mimics models of autobiographical memory in cognitive psychology, not only of so-called “flashbulb memory” or surprising, high-affect events, but also of Life Story in general: vast periods of fleeting detail, with dense memory clusters around events that were encoded in moments of arousal, with curious memory affects just before and after those events, possibility illustrating what Jefferey Zacks presents as a “gating” model of event perception. Drawing on the scientific literature on event segmentation, arousal and memory, and time perception, and likewise drawing on literary scholarship on time and stylistics in the novel, this chapter will explore the implications and limitations of using POS tagging to try and tease out quantifiable units of “information” from large corpora of novels utilizing one-way repeated measures MANOVA. Applications for these findings in literary scholarship will be discussed throughout—for instance, while scenes involving sex or violence are predictably information-dense in most texts in the corpus that were hand-scored for accuracy (and subsequently used as training texts for the algorithm), in-book variation from the norm and from nearby passages is more predictive than a raw density score alone. For example, when Stephen Dedalus has sex in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, imagistic detail goes down compared to nearby scenes and compared to the more detail-dense passages in the text, which seems to be typical of Joyce: while he does vary density according to temporality and that maps roughly to “significant” scenes, the most emotional scenes tend to be written more sparely (spare for that author, that is—Joyce is not Hemingway). That may be an authorial quirk, or it may be that he relies upon a second strategy to stimulate a reader’s emotional response: semantic content that’s normally cued to a strong negative or positive valence. Chapter 3 will attend to the ways some authors resist narrative’s “ease of use” in order to prompt their readers to interrogate what’s Real. This chapter zooms in on a specific period of American and British literature, and a genre within that brief time: the rise of Creative Nonfiction and/or New Journalism, with a close read or “case study” of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This chapter proposes that the authors set out to create narratives that would reflect the “real” lives of their subjects, with an objective of making those lives feel real to their readership. But were they successful? Drawing on cognitive psychology research in psychosis, metacognition, and temporal sense, this chapter aims to elucidate how literary narratives like these may “aim to fail” at certain features of deep narrative form (as discussed in the prior chapters) in order to “startle” their readers into a less passive state, in order to better mimic the qualia of witnessing something in the real world, and thereby produce a sense that the subjects within the text are Real. These embedded structural failures are often more subtle than anything Brechtian, but nevertheless can be found both quantitatively and in close reading, which may indicate that when a long-form narrative text purposefully aims to make a reader uncomfortably aware of Reality--especially when motivated by known, deep ethical concerns--it may “work” in ways that have less to do with the subject or content of the text and more to do with form.