The Effectiveness of the Five Senses Enhancement Training on Cognitive Ability and Social Skills of Students with Mathematical Learning Disabilities

A specific learning disability is a disorder that interferes with a student’s ability to listen, think, speak, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations. Students with a specific learning disability may struggle with reading, writing, or math. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the five senses enhancement training (5-SET) on cognitive ability and social skills of students with mathematical learning disabilities (MLD).

The present study was a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest-follow-up design with control group. The statistical population included all students referred to the Learning Problems Center of Ferdows City in the 2019-20 academic year. A sample of 30 students was selected by purposive sampling and randomly assigned in the control and experimental groups. Then, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV) (2003) was performed, and the Matson Evaluation of Social Skills with Youngsters (1983) and Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (Givia et al., 2000) were used as data collection instruments in two phases of pretest and posttest. The experimental group received the 5-SET for ten 70-minutes-sessions, while the control group underwent no interventions. Then, both groups were assessed as the posttest. Finally, the follow-up phase was performed after two months. Data were analyzed by the one-way analysis of covariance in the SPSS statistics-23 software.

The results of the data analysis showed that the effect of the group on the combination of cognitive ability variables (F = 149.942, p <0.001, effect size = 0.847) and social skills (F = 126.809, P <0.001, effect size = 0.824) is significant in students with learning disabilites.

According to the results of the present study the 5-SET can be used as an effective intervention on the cognitive ability and social skills of students with MLD.