Who was Marianne Frostig?
Marianne Frostig was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1906. After training as a social worker and eurhythmics and gymastics teacher, she studied education and psychology in the USA. In 1947 she founded the Marianne Frostig Center of Educational Therapy in Los Angeles, California. She herself directed this internationally recognized school for children with learning disabilities until 1972.
In cooperation with her colleagues at the Center, she developed an approach for teaching children with specific learning disabilities known as the Frostig Approach. It is not a specific method but a concept for the holistic development of the child's personality and the treatment of learning disabilities. In the course of developing her approach, she integrated a number of fundamental educational and psychological theories and methods in order to find the "right" way of learning for each individual child.
Marianne Frostig stressed the necessity of an interdisciplinary and multdimensional diagnostic evaluation as a basis for planing an educational or therapeutic learning program for each child. She and her team developed standardized tests to assess the child's developmental status in movement (motor skills) and perception. These are:
For use in Germany, The Marianne Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception has been restandardized and new guidelines for evaluation and interpretation have been developed (FEW - Frostigs Entwicklungstest der visuellen Wahrnehmung, Lockowand, 7th ed., 1993). The Frostig Movement Skills Test Battery has been published in Germany as FTM - Frostig Test der Motorischen Entwicklung by Bratfisch, 1985, using a Swedish standardization.
- Frostig Movement Skills Test Battery (Orpet, 1972)
- The Marianne Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception (Frostig et. al., 1964)
The results of these tests, together with other diagnostic procedures evaluating language, cognitive development, academic achievement and the social-emotional development, are the basis for planning an individual educational or therapeutic program.
Marianne Frostig developed special programs for movement education and for the improvement of visual-perceptual abilities. These are:
These programs, though, are only part of Marianne Frostig’s humanistic, holistic and integrated approach to working with children.
- MGL Move-Grow-Learn (Frostig, Maslow, 1972)
- The Developmental Program in Visual Perception (Frostig et, al., 1972)