Records of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Psycho-Educational Clinic

The Harvard Graduate School of Education Psycho-Educational Clinic was founded in 1917, with Walter Fenno Dearborn serving as the director from 1917 to 1947. After Dearborn’s retirement, Orval Hobart Mowrer headed the Clinic. The primary aim of the Psycho-Educational Clinic was to improve the reading skills and abilities of people, particularly children, with serious reading disabilities, including dyslexia (often called “word-blindness”). In his work with the Psycho-Educational Clinic, Dearborn also studied connections between eye movements and reading ability, physical eye conditions such as aniseikonia, child development and growth, and intelligence testing.

Walter Fenno Dearborn was professor of education and director of the Psycho-Educational Clinic at Harvard from 1917 to 1947. Dearborn was born on July 19, 1878 in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1896 and received an AB in 1900 and AM in 1903 from Wesleyan University. After receiving a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Columbia University in 1905, Dearborn taught educational psychology at University of Wisconsin from 1905 to 1909. He then received his MD from University of Munich in 1913. In 1912, Dearborn began teaching at Harvard and became a professor and director of the Psycho-Educational Clinic of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1917. He received an honorary AM from Harvard in 1941. In 1947, Dearborn became Professor Emeritus and began teaching at Lesley College. He died on June 20, 1955 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Dearborn’s contributions to the field of educational psychology included three main interests: reading problems, the relationship of physical growth to intelligence, and intelligence tests. His research on reading problems included investigations of the nature of binocular eye movements in reading and development; the development of apparatuses for research; and the relationship between visual anomalies, primarily aniseikonia, and the ability to read. In his work with the Psycho-Educational Clinic, Dearborn worked with children with reading disabilities. The work included research on “word blindness” (dyslexia) and the connection between eye- and hand-dominance and reading ability. Dearborn also taught remedial reading courses designed to increase reading speed at Harvard, which included the use of films developed with the Harvard Film Service. During the 1920s and 1930s, Dearborn headed the Harvard Growth Study, a longitudinal study of the physical and mental growth of schoolchildren in the Boston area. Dearborn also studied the development and use of tests for general mental ability, creating the Dearborn Group Tests of Intelligence. From 1922 to 1926, Dearborn edited the series Studies in Educational Psychology and Educational Measurement.