Impact of Intervention in Remediating Visual Perception Skills of Urban School Children with Poor Handwriting

The present study is an attempt to evaluate the impact of intervention programme in remediating visual perception skills of urban school children with poor handwriting. The total sample consisted of 60 children of grade 3 from the public schools of Ludhiana city with average or above average intellectual abilities. Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (Raven, 1965) was used to assess the intellectual abilities of the children. Occupational Therapy Screening Test (Lilley, 2006) Set A and Set B were used to assess handwriting and different sub-skills of visual perception respectively. An individualized need-based remedial intervention programme based on multisensory, visuo-motor integration and cognitive approaches was developed to improve handwriting legibility of children. Efficacy of the developed programme was assessed by comparing pre and post-intervention scores of the children. Pre-intervention scores revealed that more than half of the children with poor handwriting skills were found to have poor visual perception followed by average and good level. However, after intervention, significant improvement was found in this skill. The results also revealed that before intervention, out of all the sub-skills of visual perception 'Visual Motor Integration' followed by 'Visual Discrimination' were found to be the poorest among such children. However, after receiving intervention, these sub-skills became the strongest skills of such children. It was further found that significant improvement in the mean scores of children was observed during post-intervention assessment across all the levels and sub-skills of visual perception.