The Effectiveness of Kephart's Visual-Motor Method on Improving Writing Skill of Elementary School Students with Specific Learning Disorders

Abstract Background and Purpose: The aim of this research was to determine the effectiveness of Kephart's visual-motor method on writing skills of students with writing problems. Method: The research had a quasi-experimental-clinical design with pre-test, post-test and follow-up. The intervention was based on the Kephart's visual-motor method. The subjects were selected among the students with writing problems who were referred to centers for specific learning disorders in Rafsanjan in 2018 and were diagnosed based on the tests conducted in the centers. In this study, ten students were selected through random sampling. The interventions were administered in ten sessions (one session every week). To evaluate the writing skills, the translated and adapted version of Orton Gillingham's writing assessment questionnaire was administered. The data were analyzed using SPSS software (version 22) and Friedman's non-parametric test. Results: The findings showed that Kephart's visual-motor method was effective on improving visual clarity (pvalue=0.00), visual completion (pvalue=0.018), visual form and context (pvalue=0.018) and passive learning (pvalue=0.002). But, it was not effective in the other twelve subscales. The pairwise comparison of means in the Wilcoxon test showed the stability of the improvement in most of the pairwise comparisons of post-test with pre-test, follow-up with pre-test at a significance level of 0.05. But the stability of the effect was not significant at the 0.05 level by examining the pairwise comparison of follow-up and post-test.