A Developmental Test of Visual Perception for Evaluating Normal and Neurologically Handicapped Children

Over the past several years the senior author has worked both intensively and extensively with children who exhibited a wide range of disrurbances. It was noted that certain perceptual tasks which were easily performed by children without perceptual impairment could not at first be executed by those children who had been diagnosed as handicapped. However, in the course of training, these handicapped children often acquired many of the perceptual skills which they had previously lacked. To facilitate the early detection and categorization of such perceptual impairment, a preliminary instrument was devised and normative data obtained so that the degrees rsnd kinds of deviations from these norms could be assessed. On the basis of the results of testing a sample of 434 normal children and a sample of 71 children with learning difficulties, most of them with a medical diagnosis of neurologically handicapped, a new version of this test was developed. During this same period, use of newly devised uaining methods gave clinical evidence of providing specific aid in those areas of perceptual disability measured by the test. Rationale