LD Blog

Michael van Baker, a Seattle-based writer, writes entries in his blog about books he’s reading. One of them is Mel Levine’s latest. Interestingly, Mr. van Baker arrives at the fascinating conclusion that Dr. Levine argues for a new variation on a 1950-60s concept, N. Kephart’s “perceptual-motor match.”

Perceptual-motor match was a critical part of Kephart’s ideas about children’s development and accounted for many Learning Disabilities; see Slow Learner in the Classroom, for example. The theory was that motor skills develop prior to perceptual skills and and children had to learn to match perceptions with previously developed motor information. Therapies based on Kephart’s views generally had little or no beneficial effects of learning of students with LD; for research, see Libby Goodman and Don Hammill, “The effectiveness of the Kephart-Getman activities in perceptual and motor and cognitive skills. (1973, Focus on Exceptional Children, 4, 1-10) and Ken Kavale and P. D. Mattson, “‘One jumped off the balance beam’: Meta-analysis of perceptual-motor-training.” (1983; Journal of Learning Disabilities, 16, 165-173.

Anyway, here’s a quote from Mr. van Baker’s analysis.

Simply put, we say we understand things, we “grasp” them, because we learned to grasp objects, and that neural memory of “grasp” is what is activated when we are trying to “get” something.

That’s probably too simple, but Levine approaches from the direction of learning disability and makes a similar discovery. Kids who have developmental disorders affecting their motor skills can have pervasive trouble grasping concepts. To master any abstract behavior it’s necessary to revisit its physical expression.

I’ll leave further comment on Dr. Levine’s views for another post, definitely one that will fall into the category of “musings.”

Here’s a link to the entry in which Mr. van Baker talks about the match. There’s also another entry on Dr. Levine’s latest book.