Abstract

Identifying the characteristics of children with special needs is a bit difficult (IPEK, S., & DIKICI SIGIRTMAC, 2024). The difficulty lies in the fact that each of these characteristics is identified in a categorical manner. Most of these problems arise from sensory, perceptual-motor, and motor-focused learning (Vidal, P. P., & Lacquaniti, F, 2021). Perceptual motor skills are the abilities that children develop through their senses, allowing them to move and interact with their environment (Stephens-Sarlós, E., Stephens, 2024). These skills allow children to understand how their bodies move and how much force is applied in certain situations. With perceptual-motor skills, children can sit without falling, close a door with appropriate force, develop handwriting, and play carefully with others (Jeon, H., & Jun, S, 2021). Unlike gross motor skills, which are large physical actions that define movement (such as crawling, running, or jumping), perceptual-motor skills rely on sensory-based concepts such as timing, coordination, and spatial awareness to make movement safe (Adolph, K. E., & Hoch, 2020). The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of a teaching method based on perceptual-motor exercises on the motor, cognitive, and metacognitive skills of students with special needs.
This study is a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test and post-test with a control group and an applied one. The statistical population in this study was all students with special needs aged 6 to 9 in Babol city in 2017, which was 175 people in total. In this study, 25 people were selected from each of the experimental and control groups to select the research sample. Given the facilities and cooperation of the managers and teachers of the exceptional schools in Babol, 47 students (one experimental group and one control group) were selected through convenience sampling. In this study, the experimental group was placed in a well-equipped and cheerful environment for 36 weekly sessions (3 months and 3 sessions per week) and each session lasted 30 to 45 minutes under the supervision of a medical expert in order to prevent injury to the subjects. They worked with the equipment provided in the environment. At the end of the 36 sessions of the teaching period, children's development was measured using the scales mentioned in the pre-test, and the pre-test and post-test scores were compared. To examine the effect of the teaching method using perceptual-motor exercises in the school environment, facilities, training, and practice were used to create an environment with high capabilities in line with the variables under study. To assess children's motor development skills, the Bruynincks-Ozeretsky motor proficiency tests, the Toulouse-Piron attention test, and to examine metacognitive development, the Children's Metacognitive Questionnaire (MCQ-C) were used. The perceptual-motor skills designed to enhance motor, cognitive, and metacognitive development in the present intervention were designed based on the book Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (Yarmohammadian, 2009) and the skills needed by children to enter school (Abadi, 2014). The intervention sessions were conducted by the researcher and two assistant psychologists with a master's degree, and after the end of the sessions, a post-test was administered to both groups of children. In order to comply with research ethics, the process and objectives of the research were explained to school officials, teachers, and parents of the students, and they were informed that this study was only a research study and that those who did not wish to participate could not participate.The data were analyzed using the univariate covariance method. The results showed that the teaching method based on perceptual-motor exercises had a positive effect on improving metacognitive skills and motor development, including upper limb coordination, balance, response speed, and strength (P<0.01). The results of this study also showed that the teaching method based on perceptual-motor exercises had no effect on the variables of attention, agility, and upper limb speed and agility (P>0.01). According to the results of this study, it can be concluded that special attention should be paid to new teaching methods, as well as environmental capabilities and the use of appropriate teaching methods to increase the motor, cognitive and metacognitive development capabilities of children with special needs, and methods based on perceptual-motor exercises can be used for more effective teaching in special schools. The reason is that perceptual-motor skills are important intermediary functions, they create complex and purposeful systems that are the basis of cognition, and the development of perceptual-motor skills is effective in the comprehensive development of the child, and it is likely that the growth and strengthening of perceptual-motor systems in children in the early years of life is the basis and introduction to the development of perceptual skills, especially the cognitive system. This finding is consistent with other studies (Ryalls, B. O., Harbourne, 2016). In a study (Tse, A., 2019) that examined the effect of perceptual-motor skills on learning in children with autism, it was concluded that perceptual-motor exercises were effective in increasing the motor skills of children with autism and had a significant impact on increasing these skills. The expansion and combination of motor patterns leads to motor generalizations. Motor generalizations refer to the unification and integration of motor patterns within a broader range of motor tasks and actions. These skills have been effective in the efficiency of motor learning in children with autism. Considering the results of some research (Harry, B., & Klingner, J, 2014) which indicate the weakness of special needs students in spatial understanding and relationships, these problems disrupt the mental representation of the number system and cause these children to be unable to recognize the distance between numbers and their respective locations. It is obvious that considering the inadequacy of special needs students in finding relationships between the number system, location, space, object stability, length, area, volume, ratio, order, and recognition of sets, training in understanding spatial relationships can be used to reduce these deficiencies. Of course, teachers' creativity in designing teaching methods based on motor and cognitive programs can also have a great impact on learning problems for students with special needs (Razi and Shamami, 2019). Keywords: Perceptual-motor exercises, motor development, metacognitive development, cognitive development, children with special needs.