Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Background and objective: Although the most important difference between humans and other creatures is their mental abilities, it can be seen that some people have some mental problems that affect different aspects of their lives. One of the most important of these problems is intellectual disability. Mental retardation is one of the common developmental disorders due to its side effects and widespread prevalence. The results of previous studies have shown that students with learning disabilities have problems in handwriting skills, attention and working memory; therefore, it is very important to use appropriate methods to improve these problems. One of these effective methods is visual-motor training. Therefore, the aim of this research was to determine the effectiveness of visual-motor training on handwriting skills, attention and active memory of children with educable intellectual disabilities.
Method: This study was semi–experimental and was conducted with a pre–test–post–test design with two control and experimental groups. The statistical population of the present study was made up of students with intellectual disabilities who are 11 to 16 years old in Tehran in 2023 years. Among the statistical population, 30 qualified volunteers were available entered into the study and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups (each group includes 15 people). The criteria for entering participants to the research include: Having an IQ of 55 to 70, being in the age range of 11 to 16 years, interested in participating in the research and not having serious speech, physical and movement problems affecting the process of the sessions. Exclusion criteria were absenteeism more than out of three sessions, non–observance of group therapy rules and incomplete of tests in the research. In this research, ethical standards including obtaining informed consent and guaranteeing privacy and confidentiality were observed. Also, at the time of participating in the research, the participants were free to withdraw from the research at any time and provide personal information. They were assured that the information would remain confidential and this was also fully respected. After the end of the research, in order to maintain ethical standards, some of the motor skills training conducted in the experimental group was also implemented for the control group. Both groups completed the handwritten checklist (Hadavand Khani et al., 2014) and Wechsler Attention and Working Memory Test (Wechsler, 1930) in the pre-test and post-test stages. The visual-motor training program was implemented in the experimental group as a 10 session’s 60–minute and three times a week, but the control group did not receive any treatment plan. Data analysis was carried out in two parts: descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. At the level of descriptive statistics of frequency, mean, and standard deviation and inferential statistics, analysis of covariance was used. Data analysis was done in SPSS software version 26, and the significance level of the tests was considered to be 0.05.
Findings: The mean and standard deviation of the experimental group participants' age was 14.06 and 1.48 years, and the control group's mean and standard deviation was 13.80 and 1.20 years. The results showed that there was a significant difference in all three variables of handwriting skills, attention and working memory between the experimental and control groups in the post-test, after removing the effect of the pre-test (p<0.001). Also, visual-motor training could increase handwriting by 75%, attention by 59%, and working memory by 79%.
Conclusion: Based on the findings of the research, it is concluded that visual-motor training for students with educable intellectual disabilities is a suitable method to improve their handwriting skills, attention and working memory.