Accommodative facility test results and academic success in Polish second graders.

BACKGROUND: Accommodative infacility, as commonly measured by accommodative flippers, has been implicated as a factor in academic underperformance. This study compares four areas of academics (reading, writing, math and gym) to accommodative flexibility scores.

METHODS: Seventy-six elementary school children with a mean age was 8 years, 8 months were tested monocularly and binocularly with traditional accommodative flexibility flipper testing and with a new accommodative flexibility apparatus that allows control of visual acuteness, minification/magnification, and reaction time. These scores were then compared with academic scores using a number of failure criteria. The academic ratings were based on teacher responses for each student.

RESULTS: Our data did not show any clear correlation or relationship between evaluations by reading, writing, math, or gym teachers and accommodative flexibility by either the traditional or new testing methods.

CONCLUSION: Accommodative function, free of contaminating variables, does not appear to predict academic function any better than the traditional.