Bear, R. M. (1948). The educationally backward. In L. A. Pennington & I. A. Berg (Eds.), An introduction to clinical psychology (pp. 138-156). Oxford, England: Ronald Press; New York, NY, US: Ronald Press Company.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/10577-028
Many normal persons of all ages have educational disabilities which prevent their deriving maximum benefit from their opportunities for learning and living. Not one of the least of the unfortunate results is the emotional warping of interpersonal relations. This is the more tragic because disabilities are not inevitable and are subject to great improvement if proper diagnostic treatment is given. Nonreaders have repeatedly been taught to read by kinesthetic, phonetic, and visual techniques. Cases of retarded readers illustrate the multiple causation of failure to develop proper reading adjustments. Adequate diagnosis calls for a case study, although in many instances remedial treatment should begin before the study is completed. Individual remedial work geared to the individual's specific deficiencies commonly produces reading gains of from one to two years in less than half that time. The related language skills of spelling and writing also manifest some disturbance in cases of severe reading disability, and both will profit by remedial work for the latter. On the other hand, much poor spelling is attributable to ineffective methods of studying words, and the chief concerns of the psychologist are to secure motivation and to provide a method which the individual can continue to use independently. The importance of "mirror writing" as a clinical symptom has been popularly overexaggerated. Ordinarily, this condition seems to be an undesirable habit which the left-handed are probably more likely to stumble upon. With proper teaching, the habit disappears. While a large proportion of people have trouble with arithmetic, it is inevitable only in the mentally deficient. Above the primary-grade level much of the difficulty is the result of incorrect ideas and habits or failure to learn earlier fundamental processes. By using a diagnostic test it is possible to identify these errors and to correct them in a minimum of time under conditions of motivated practice. One of the problems in this field is that social usage does not provide enough practice to keep skills alive until needed in later work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)