The effect of Frostig visual perception programme on educable mentally retarded children

The purpose of this research is to find out the effects of Frostig Visual Perception Training Programme on visual perception development in the Painting education of the Educable Mentally Retarded Children.Research group is consisted of 20 children who are Educable Mentally Retarded Children with an IQ level ranged between 50-75 IQ sutudying at GATA TSK Sağlık Vakfı Özel Eğitim ve İlköğretim Okulu Rehabilitasyon Merkezi. Randomly 10 sutudents are selected for the experimen tal group and other 10 sutudents are selected for the control group. All participants has been given Frostig Visual Perception Test. According to the evaluation of the pre-test the visual perception skills of experimental and control groups are seen equal.Application of Frostig Visual Perception Training Programme on experimental group has taken 2 months, for an hour 2 times a week. The control group has taken for their regular Art Education.Frostig Visual Perception Test is given again to the experimental and control groups as a final test. For the statistical solutions of the data obtained from the tests : Mann-Whitney U-Test for the comparison of the groups and individuals within the groups , Wilcoxon test for comparing the results of the pre-test and final test, are applied and the evaluation results are stated on given tables.According to the results of the final test; applied on both experimental and control groups in the dimensions of visual -perception skills, eye-motor coordination, figure-ground perception, perception of figure constancy, perception of space - position, and perception of spatial relations; a meaningful development in the level of 0.05 is observed in children in the experimental group. According to the results obtained from the comparison of pre-test and final test applied on the experimental group, a meaningful development in the level of 0.05 is seen in all dimensions of visual perception whereas development only in eye-motor coordination dimension is seen in the control group as they have continued to teke their regular Art education. It is expected that experimental group will have meaningfully higher statistical scores on last tests. After this research this goal has been attained and the group had had higher scores on most of the areas that has been con-sidered as important. The differences are meaningful.Frostig visual perception training programme that has been used by the researcher has been positively effected general visual perception development and related sub-systems.According to the results of this research, "Frostig Visual Perception Training Programme" has positive effects on visual perception development of the Educable Mentally Retarded Children.