TRIAL TEACHING: THE MISSING LINK
BARBARA
A.
HUTSON
AND
JEROME
A.
NILES
State
University
of
New
York
at
..llban?/
Too often, the teacher’s response to the psychologist’s report is
idso
what?”
The report simply does not answer the question that she had about how best to
help a student. The teacher’s question and the student’s difficulty frequently
revolve around academic skills. While emotional factors may be involved, often
they are a reaction to the frustration and failure that a disabled learner faces every
day.
The psychologist usually approaches the task by using standardized intelligence
tests, and perhaps even an achievement test.
It
is important to analyze not only
what the student has learned, but how he goes about learning. Rohwer (1971)
stresses the need to distinguish between “the recall of information
or
the application
of
skills acquired previously.
. .
[p.
2021”
and “the acquisition or production of new
information
or skills. . . [p.
2021.”
Information about both aspects is important in
the planning of educational intervention, but standardized tests usually are ill-
suited to measure the acquisition
of
new information.
Another goal
of
psychoeducational evaluation is determination of the most
suitable methods of presentation of curriculum. Glaser (1972) notes that tests of
general ability, intelligence, and aptitude attempt to predict the outcomes of
learning, but “make little attempt to measure those abilities that are related to
different
wu~s
of learning. .
.
[
p. 71.”
An
effective approach to determining the
most suitable method to teach a given child is a brief period
of
trial teaching, which
can provide the missing link between the psychologist’s function and the teacher’s
need.
Close analysis of the effects of teaching a few skills
or concepts to a child pro-
vides a
dynamic
evaluation of the on-going process of learning, in contrast to the
static
evaluation of the residue of learning provided by standardized testing.
This aspect of diagnosis can be performed by the psychologist, reading
or
classroom
teacher,
or
through joint effort.
READING
INSTRUCTION
AND
EVALUATION
Most psychologists have little knowledge of how reading usually is taught.
Approaches to reading can be described best in terms of Whole Word approach or
Component Analysis approach. The many teaching programs are essentially com-
binations that vary the emphasis on one
or
the other of these.
The Whole Word approach emphasizes mastery through associating the
verbal label with the visual configuration of the word.
Component Analysis may
take several forms, but they all attempt to teach the child ways to analyze the
written word into parts that are associated with sounds.
The best known is the
phonics approach, in which the child is taught to decode words by utilizing letter-
sound associations. The “word family” method employs lists of similar words
such as bat, cat, at, fat; the child is taught to substitute one initial consonant
sound for another. The currently popular linguistic method
is
similar except that
the child is not taught direct,ly the consonant
or
vowel sounds in isolation, but is
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