Pilot Project Assessing the Effectiveness of a Prescription Method of Teaching Certain Visual Motor Skills to Preschool Exceptional Children

The present study was a pilot project conducted in order to develop an on-going visual and motor training program as part of the preschool curriculum in a local day care center for exceptional children. The project was designed to assess whether a behaviorally oriented prescriptive teaching method along with primary and social reinforcement was an effective procedure in teaching specific visual and motor skills. Seven children indicating a favorable prognosis for being integrated into the regular school system were selected to participate in this project. The ages for the Ss ranged from three years, seven months (3-7) to seven years, nine months (7-9). The treatment for the four experimental subjects consisted of 20 minutes of daily individualized training on specific gross motor, self help, and visual motor behaviors. The control Ss participated in the regular activities at the center during the six weeks of training. The results indicated that the Ss in the experimental group made significantly greater gains over the control group as measured by the improvement on the checklist of behaviors developed for this project. The findings also indicated that those experimental Ss who obtained the lowest pretest scores made greater gains than the experimental Ss with higher pretest scores. This suggested that this direct method of instruction was more effective with those Ss in most need of the training