The Influence of Computer Games on Visual-Motor Skills in Deaf Students

Deafness is a major cause of psychological and cognitive problems. Because deaf children develop without exposure to external and environmental acoustic stimuli, some aspects of their psychomotor activities are, at times, less developed than children without hearing impairments. Previous studies have shown that deaf and children hard of hearing achieve lower results on the visual–motor integration test than children of typical development. It has also been shown that early deafness can be reflected in the slower development of visual–motor skills. Computer games are thought to stimulate visual–motor integration. Through the use of the mouse and keyboard, a child tries to co-ordinate a movement with the visual perception that is being received, in this case, from the screen. Deaf children are initially uncertain when using the mouse and keyboard. They, however, become more confident and more dexterous with repetition of these activities in the course of time. Although numerous studies have investigated the effects of computers on the academic achievements of pupils, there are only a small number of studies investigating the effects of specialized computer software designed to stimulate visual–motor skills in deaf children. This study was carried out to investigate the effect of specialized computer games on the visual-motor skills of deaf students. This is a two-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental research. A total of 30 deaf children aged 7 to 10 years old were selected using convenient sampling. The participants were selected from among the clients of a hospital and State Welfare Organization of Tehran-Iran. Attempts were made to make sure that all the participants were the students of deaf schools, they have all received cochlear implants and they did not have any other disability or incapability. The information related to their education level, physical health, possible disabilities and the amount of hearing loss was obtained from the participants’ rehabilitation files in the relevant center. The participants were assigned to the experimental and control group in equal numbers (7 girls and 8 boys). Test of Visual-Motor Skills-Revised was administered to the participants. This test includes following subscales visual-spatial skills, visual analysis skills and visual-motor integration skills. The experimental group was taught by specialized computer games in 20 individual sessions of 50 minutes twice a week. ANCOVA procedures were used to analyze the data through SPSS-21. The findings showed that training by the use of specialized computer games has a significant effect on the improving the visual-motor skills of deaf students (p<0.05) in the areas of visual-spatial skills, visual analysis skills and visual-motor integration skills (p<0.05). The results confirm the positive effect of specialized computer games, when they are carefully selected and are applied in appropriate doses, on the development of the visual–motor skills in deaf students. The eye-hand coordination computer games used in this study certainly can enhance the development of visual-spatial skills, visual analysis skills and visual-motor integration as well. This training method can be suggested to the scientific community of education and rehabilitation for deaf children as an effective and efficient method to improve visual-motor skills.