Abstract
Purpose :
Pomona Unified School District students have a history of poor standardized test scores. One of the reasons for poorer performance in education may be related to ocular condition or status. The speed of reading and comprehension may be related to ocular dominance. We sought to investigate if the difference on the California Standards Test (CST) results for ELA, (English-Language Arts), was related to ocular dominance.
Methods :
Over the course of 4 years, 2009-2012, 1,573 children in the 5th grade from the Pomona Unified School District were screened for hand and eye dominance. The hand dominance was determined by the use of the preferred hand for writing their name or drawing a circle. Eye dominance was determined using the Miles criteria. The Pomona Unified School District released the results on the California Standards Test (CST) for the group of children that completed the visual eye dominance testing for both the ELA. The CST uses scaled scores for grade level equivalency, and the minimum score of 350 is considered proficient, 350-394. There are also categories below 350 of Basic (B) 300-349, Below Basic (BB) 271-299, and Far Below Basic (FBB) 150-270. There is also a category for Advanced (A), 395-600. Complete sets of data were available for 1,573 children for the ELA testing at the time of this analysis.
Results :
Figure 1 provides the results in detail about the ocular dominance and the scores obtained on the standardized CST test for English-Language Arts (ELA) component. The results indicate that there is about a 3% lower percentage of individuals that score Advanced level on CST if they are left eye dominant and there is a 3% greater left eye dominant individuals in not proficient category.
Conclusions :
There are a multitude of vision skills and other factors that may be contributing to the low scores on these standardized tests. It appears that ocular dominance may play a role in part. Further multifactorial analysis is needed that accounts for various parameters in establishing the reasons for poor testing performance.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.