A Screening For Visual Processing Disabilities In Pre-School Children.

Presently visual screenings are performed on school aged children as mandated by state law. These screenings do a good job in detecting youngs ters with abnorma l amounts of
hyperopia, myopia, astingmatism, phoric postures and stereopsis; however, it is possi ble for youngsters to have good visual acuities and proper binocular alignment, but be
unable to process the visual information properly. Kirk and Chalfrant describe two such children. Tony at age nine and in the fourth grade was not learning to read. Examinations eliminated mental retardation, auditory impairment and a visual defect as explanations for the
child's inability to read. The question was why, after regular schooling for three years and with average intelligence and intact sensory acuity he was unable to decode words and sentences. Further testing revealed that Tony had a problem with visual memory. He was unable to reproduce a visually presented word from memory. The word "horse", for example was written on the board. Tony was told that the word was horse. The word was erased and he was asked to write the word on the board from memory. Seven repetitions were required before he was able to perform this task. Tony was taught to use visualization in recognizing
sight words and thus learned how to read. Another six-yearold child had difficulty identifying objects seen, even her classmates, though she had normal visua l acuity. This girl,
like Tony had a visual perceptual disability that would go undetected during the standard visual screening. The purpose of this study is to e stablish baseline data from a simple screening test designed to detec t visual perceptual problems in preschool children. It is the hope that the test may someday be helpful in the early detection of visual perceptual problems before they affect l ater learning, particularly reading.