Motor profile developments in pre-school children with special educational needs after brief psychomotor intervention

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the psychomotor profile of kindergarten children with special educational needs (SEN), before and after brief psychomotor intervention. The study included five children from level II, participants from the Multifunction Resource Classroom of a Public School. Two children had Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), two had no defined diagnosis, and one had intellectual disability. We used for evaluation: 1) Operational Portage Inventory, in order to obtain relative data, socialization, cognition, language, and self-care; 2) Motor Development Scale to evaluate the psychomotor profile. Subsequently, we designed a psychomotor intervention program for each individual, with two sessions per week, totaling twenty-four sessions, in order to stimulate the lagged psychomotor functions. Afterwards, with the end of the interventional program, the children were reassessed with the mentioned instruments. The data was analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively (SAS System program for Windows, version 16.0). At the time of evaluation, all children had motor profile lower than the chronological age, either in aspects of cognition, language, as self-care; lag in socialization was also observed in both children with ASD. After the intervention process, no significant statistically difference between the data obtained before and after the intervention was observed. However, there was evolution of 4/5 children in all analyzed aspects. One can conclude that the routine psychomotor approach on kindergarten children with SEN can maximize their overall performance and, consequently, their learning abilities.