Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

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Ghasemzadeh S, Yazdi M, Ghaznavi Kashani Z. The Effectiveness of the Designed Play-Based Educational Program on Phonological awareness in Children with Down syndrome. MEJDS 2018; 8 :56-56
URL: http://jdisabilstud.org/article-1-1096-en.html

Background & Objective: Phonological awareness skills are among the most critical factors contributing to the successful learning of reading skills in children. The importance of learning phonemes in reading achievement lies in the fact that the child learns words how to incorporate them and lay them together, make words and put together words to learn the expression and ultimately, by understanding the meaning of the vocabulary and comprehends texts by learning phonemes and understanding their relationships. Any problem or weakness in this area would result in the impairment of the ability to learn reading skills. One issue facing the children with Down syndrome is a poor phonological awareness resulting in the limited cognitive ability to learn reading skills. Poor reading skills in children with Down syndrome give rise to a host of subsequent problems such as poor verbal communication skills and social relationships, which, in turn, undermine their self-confidence and lead to social isolation. The present study aimed to assess the effectiveness‏ of game-based learning programs on the improvement of the phonological awareness of children with Down syndrome.
Methods: This research was a quasi-experimental study with pretest and posttest. The statistical population of the study consisted of all elementary school students with Down syndrome in Tehran, from whom 20 students were selected from Sarikhani’s Special School using convenience sampling and randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. The study participants randomly selected from among students with educable Down syndrome whose records had been submitted to the researcher by the relevant school officials. The experimental group completed the learning program in 18 sessions (2 two-hour sessions per week). The structure of the session was in this way; in the first of meeting playing Aimless was done about ten and quarter times. Because of the students to be warm for ready to learning, so that practised and remembered the content of past sessions and after that started content related with new meeting and end of the meeting because of becoming other sessions, the assignment associated with content trained given to the students. The sessions held in cooperation with the school principal and coordination with the official in charge in the school gymnasium, which was well suited to the teaching of learning skills using games incorporated into the program. Therefore, the participants received the lessons in a favourable environment distinct from school classrooms. This program consisted of all topics relating to phonological awareness including the recognition of sounds and rhymes, the reading of words, etc. In the present study, data were collected using the Kormi Nouri and Moradi Reading and Dyslexia Test (2005) at the pretest and posttest stages. It should be mentioned that the Korami Nouri and Moradi Reading and Dyslexia Test matched to the group of Down syndrome children. Finally, data were analysed using multivariate ANCOVA in SPSS 24.
Results: After a nine-week intervention, the progress made by the intervention group in terms of sound deletion and the reading of words, non-words, and rhymes was significantly higher than the control group. The analysis of data indicated that, after controlling for the differences in pretest scores, the average post-test scores of the experimental and control groups were significantly (p<0.001) higher than the control group after the administration of word chain, sentence correction, word reading, and sound deletion tests. The overall mean score of the experimental group was also significantly higher than the control group. Therefore, the present study showed improvement in phonological skills in children with Down syndrome.
Conclusion: From the results of this study, it can be concluded that game-based learning programs have a positive effect on the improvement of the phonological awareness of children with Down syndrome.  Therefore, this program can be a suitable educational method adopted by special needs schools to teach reading skills to children with Down syndrome. It also appears that this method can help increase the learning motivation of these children and compensate for the deficits of traditional education.