Films to Speed Up Slow Readers Near Completion; Device Developed by Film Service Will Be Tested

With a library of over 500 films up-to-date projecting, still and motion picture photography and developing equipment, the Harvard Film Service is able to keep scientific and other courses posted on recent developments in educational moving pictures.

Among its recent accomplishments, the Film Service has almost completed a set of films for steering the eyes of poor readers to increase their reading speed.

Photographic Exercises In Reading

Since many children, up to 15 per cent, have difficulty in reading, these exercises were started on the basis, as psychologists believe, that sufficient practice, training and incentive will improve the reading of both adults and children.

This device has been developed in the University by professor Walter E. Dearborn, Director of the Harvard Psycho-Educational Clinic, Irving H. Anderson, instructor in education, and James R. Brewster, Director of the Harvard Film Service, consist in the use of photographic exercise in reading.

Various texts are photographed so that groups of words appear clearly in a faint background on the printed page, and these groups of words are moved along sufficiently rapidly to exercise the subject's eyes. Successively larger phrases in different firms are provided for reading in different grades.

Fast and Slow Films Made

Other projects undertaken by the Film Service, is the making of high speed and unperceptively slow speed films. This makes it possible to observe the breaking of a bulb as well as the growing of a plant. At present it is making a print for the Harvard Forest as well as the fatigue laboratories.

In the ever growing library, documentary films, such as the pictures of the Tercentenary Celebration, reels for biology classes and on industrial management are kept, while the Service acts as a clearing house for information on films.