An investigation of the effect of balance education exercises on some self-care skills of mentally retarded children

This research intends to determine the effect of balance education exercises on selected self-care skills of mentally retarded children. In this research, the balance performance of children was measured by balance skill measuring instrument which was set up with the assistance of the specialists and both treatment and non-treatment control groups were constituted homogeneously. As prerequisite, 4 dressing - undressing skills that need balance skill were selected with the assistance of the specialists. The performance of selected skills of both groups were evaluated by the skill analysis form that is composed by the private education specialist.The balance developer exercises programme that was set up with the assistance of specialists was exucated to the treatment group for 8 weeks after the phase of performance evaluation. The selected self-care skills were exucated by the private education specialist to both groups concurrently with the balance developer exercises programme.Balance and self-care skills of both groups were evaluated at the end of week 4th and week 8th. The data obtained at the end of the research was evaluated by Wilcoxon Match-Pairs Signed Ranks Test. SPSS 11.0 package program was used for evaluations.The results of this research can be explained as followings;1)Mentally retarded children who are 5 - 7 years old have lower balance skill levels than their coequals.2)After the balance developer exercises programme that exucated to the non-treatment control group for 8 weeks, a significant development was determined on the balance skills of that group.3)The treatment group is faster than non-treatment control group at learning self-care skills. Both groups reached the level that both of them are able to achieve self-care skills self-dependencely after the exercises programme. It was pointed that some of the children of the treatment group became to be able to achieve selected self-care skills self-dependencely after the evaluation that was exucated at the end of the week 4th