Effectiveness of Vision Therapy as an Adjunct to Occupational Therapy in Improving Visual Motor Skills in Learning Disabled Children

INTRODUCTION: “Learning disability is defined as a disorder in one of the more basic psychological process involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write or do mathematical calculation - from public law 94 – 142, the Education for All handicapped Children Act. Learning disability constitutes a diverse group of disorders in which children who generally posses at-least average intelligence have problems processing information or generating output. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the study is to determine the effectiveness of occupational therapy in improving Visual Motor skills along with vision therapy in children with learning disability. METHOD: In this study a total of 30 children from the age group of 7 to 10 years participated, and were divided into 15 each in experimental and control group. The control group received only Occupational Therapy where as the experimental group received both Occupational Therapy and Vision Therapy. The Visual Motor Integration scale was used as the outcome measure for both the groups at the start of intervention and later after 3 months intervention. The data’s were recorded and analyzed for statistical analysis. RESULTS: Statistical significance is present in experimental group than control group with regard to effect of vision therapy activities with occupational therapy intervention. The data analyzed, the pretest score of control group 12.33 and post test score being 13.07, where as in experimental group the pretest score 12.53 and post test score 15.40.The paired ‘t’ test for experimental group is p < 0.01. CONCLUSION: The findings of study suggest, “Vision therapy when given along with Occupational Therapy has significant effect on improving Visuo Motor integration skills” in children with learning disability