Nelson Evening Mail TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1922 PSYCHOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LVI, 11 April 1922, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1922 PSYCHOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

'.THE London County Council was the first : municipal authority in the world to appoint a psychologist to its education service. Since 1913 many thousands of London school children have ■ been tested. An account recent ; psychological researches, entitled “Mental and Scholastic Tests,” lias now been • published. The work of the psychologist and his collaborators lias largely i concerned with the discovery of childi ren needing special education or atten- : tion —tho mentally defective and the 'dull and backward on the one hand, ! and those wtih' special talent or Intel- : ligencc on the other hand. One important conclusion stands out from these researches. Tho distribution of natural ability appears to follow flic general law of averages applicable to natural phenomena in general. If a sufficiently largo number of individuals arc Taken and their differences in ability arranged in a. graded scale, that scale ■conforms to tho “normal curve.” The ' greatest number of examples are found in tho mean positions. At tho bottom of the curve will bo a relatively small ■ number of sub-normal children, and at i the top of the curve will be a relatively 1 small number of super-normal children. Sub-normal children are those who should bo dealt with either by the fonnation of backward classes in ordinary schools, or by transfer to special schools for tli© montally defective. Super-normal children arc those who are capable of profiting from scholarships or from other facilities for proceeding to places of higher education. Some of the comparisons which emerge from the researches are of considerable interest. The average London child seems to bo a little brighter than tho average child of, say, Paris and New York. At certain ages—at about, seven, and again at about fourteen---the girls are a little brighter than tho boys. The feminine sex is the precocious sex. Later on, however, the boys catch up; indeed, the sex differences in general ability are much smaller than they are usually supposed to be. Hoys and girls play a sort of mental leap-frog with one another throughout their school eareevs —fxrst> one is on top and then the other. But in special directions the sex differences are quite distinct. Girls are much belter at reading, spelling,

handwriting,' and .composition. Boys arc better at. arithmetic ami drawing. Ear more boys are left-handed than girls, and far more boys are colourblind. Boy slammcrcr.s arc three times as numerous in London as girl stammerers. Left-hamlcdness is more than twice as common among defective as among normal children, but it is by no means rare among bright and imaginative children of emotional disposition. The researches' give some point to the assertion which has been made that the premature enforcement of right-handed activities upon highly strung and nervous children induces disturbances —of which stammering is the most conspicuous—to the nervous .system. It is important, there, that the nervous lefthanded child should not be forced to use his right hand at an early age. Girls have better memories than boys, end are hotter in verbal and linguistic tests. Boys are better at practical tests, at money tests', and at test demand’ .g observation and shrewdness. Children from good neighbourhoods are in genera! intelligence nearly a year ahead of the average. Children from the poorest neighbourhoods aro more than a year behind. The mentally defective child appears to be one who has only 70 per cenf. of the normal intelligence of children of his age. Apart from the 8000 mentally defective children in the London schools, there are, according to the psychological survey, 40,000 children who arc dull ami backward, in other words, about 7 per cent, of the children in the London elementary schools are below normal. It is from the dull ami backward group of children, rather than from the mentally defective group, that juvenile offenders are preponderantly drawn. * Among repeated offenders, particularly females, mental deficiency is common, but the ordinaiy juvenile delinquent is usually slightly dull in general ability, and distinctly backward in hia educational attainments. Such juvenile delinquents are suffering nob so much from intellectual defect as from uncontrolled instincts. The importance, therefore, of devising proper methods of educating dull and backward children is obvious, since the success or failure of those methods will very largely determine Ibc extent to which the criminal population of the country is recruited. The. psychological survey re-, veals many other singular peculiarities shown by individual children. ' Some children, for example, seem quite spontaneously to write backwards, so that what they write can never be read until it is held in front of a looking glass. It is difficult to explain what causes children to adopt this “mirror-writing.” All children at one stage or another write some of their letters backwards. Nearly 500 years ago the famous painter Leonardo da "Vinci was writing his manuscripts backwards. Left-banded ness seems to be the commonest cause of backward handwriting. The survey contains numerous studies of children who aro backward in one particular respect. Some children, for instance, are word blind; although they are normal in general intelligence, they arc scarcely able to read or spell- Suggestions for diagnosing and training these special cases are given. Some of the tests used have an interest of their own in showing how the normal child develops from year to year, and these tests are of interest to parents. It is easier for a. pai'ent to test the ability of bis child than to test the child’s attainments. An example of a simple mental test may be mentioned. Ask a child of five or six to draw a man. Ihe normal child of that ago will draw *i man with Ids arms coming out of his head. The backward child will probably draw the arms in an utterly irrelevant position. Two years later the normal child vvill have observed that the arms come fi'om the .shoulders, and will correct bis earlier drawing accordingly.