a substantial body of work has shown a positive relationship between visual perceptual
skill and academic measures such as learning readiness, reading, and math.5–13 Feagans and Merriwether9 studied the relation between poor visual discrimination ability and achievement (both reading and general) in 66 learning-disabled and 66 control children in a 6-year longitudinal study. They found that children with
reduced visual discrimination ability at age 6 or 7 performed more poorly in reading and overall achievement throughout the elementary school years compared with controls and compared with learningdisabled children without reduced visual discrimination ability.
Visual-motor integration is another visual perceptual skill that
has been shown to be positively correlated with academic achievement.
For example, Leton et al.13 administered psychometric tests
of sequencing, visual-spatial ability, auditory-verbal skill, and motoric
ability to 100 severely learning-disabled students to determine
different classifications of learning-disabled students.