Effect of Scheming Play Training Package on the Development of Selective Adaptive Skills among Children with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

Scheming play is a method that has potential to facilitate development of skills in the domains of functional academics and daily life skills for children with intellectual disabilities. The present study investigates the effect of this method for development of skills in children with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities using a two group experimental design (control (n=4) and experimental group (n=4)) and the non-parametric test, Mann-Whitney ‘u’ test, for statistical analysis. Four areas of functional mathematics skills and three areas of daily life skills were selected. The age range of the children selected for this study was 10 – 14 years. The study found that scheming play based training brought about a statistically significant improvement in the chosen functional mathematical skills and one area of daily life skills. One possible reason for the lack of observable improvement in fine motor and receptive domains in the present study could be due to the higher variability of change scores for these two areas among students with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities, which may be attributed to their prior experience with these activities. The high variability could have confounded the identification of an observable pattern of effect due to the small sample size. Therefore this effect needs to be studied further, using larger sample sizes.