A grant of $62,500 has been made by the General Education Board of New York to the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the support of the Harvard Growth Study. It was announced yesterday by Dean B. W. Holmes '03.

The Harvard Growth Study is unique and it is of exceptional important to the science of education and to every form of practical effort for the benefit of children. It consists of repeated measurements of the same children throughout the 12 years of their schooling by all the main, standardized measures of growth, physical, intellectual and scholastic.

The work was begun in the fall of 1921, and is therefore in its ninth year. The first measurements were made on a group of several thousand children shortly after their entrance into school. These children have been measured each succeeding year, and it is the intention of the investigators to continue the measurement for a total period of about 12 years, or as long as the majority of the "subjects" remain in school.

Commonwealth Fund Aids

Professor W. F. Dearborn, of the graduate School of Education, conceived the idea of the study and has directed it from the beginning. It was supported in 1921-22 and 1922-23 by the commonwealth Fund, which granted $16,000 in each of these years to the Harvard Graduate School of Education for this purpose. The Commonwealth Fund limited its grants for educational research, on principle, to two years, and it has since withdrawn from this field of activity altogether. From 1923-24 through 1928-29 the School supported the study out of its unrestricted income, and the University has made from the Milton Fund two grants at $2500 each to meet special needs in connection with the study.

The grant of the General Education Board will be available in varying amounts during the next five years, a plan which will enable the study to be carried forward with greater case that has heretofore been possible.

Expense Prohibitive

The new gift will be of great assistance to the Graduate School in its new program, under which it has raised and substantially changed its requirements for the degrees of Master of Education and Doctor of Education. The removal of the expense of supporting the Growth Study out of its regular income will consequently make possible other advances in the work of the School which have up to this time been impossible.

Among the more important of these activities are researches by Professor Dearborn and his associates in the Laboratory of Educational Psychology on the processes and mechanisms of reading. Defects in reading may result form wrong habits established in early years and may prevent the attainment of normal speed in reading throughout life. Slow reading is a tremendous handicap in study at every level. The work already done in this subject at the Graduate School of Education promises to lay bare the causes of difficulty in reading and provide meant for at least a partial correction.