Development of Physical-motor Activities Training Package and Evaluation of its Effectiveness on Handwriting Problems in Children With Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder

One of the main problems of children with attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder is deficit in fine motor skills, especially handwriting problems. Accordingly, This study aimed to develop a training package of Physical-Motor Activities and evaluate its impact on handwriting problems of children with ADHD.

The present study was applied in terms of purpose and the method of combined type (qualitative and quantitative) as the qualitative part of treatment plan and the quantitative part of quasi-experimental method with unbalanced control group design and follow-up session. Statistical population in the qualitative section is based on the theories of Barkley (2015) and includes experts in the field of child motor skills and research published in prestigious journals from 2012 to 2020 for Persian articles and from 2000 to 2020 for the English articles in the field of motor interventions for children with ADHD. The quantitative part included all boys with ADHD aged 7-12 years in the primary schools of the 16th district of Tehran. For sampling among the schools in District 16, four schools were selected as available, and 30 children with ADHD were identified in those schools and then randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups (each group including 15 children). The instruments used in the qualitative section were extracted texts and in the quantitative section were Diagnostic Questionnaire of ADHD and Handwriting Problems Questionnaire. The children in the experimental group participated in the training program in 24 sessions of 60 minutes. Data were analyzed using a mixed analysis of variance.

In the qualitative part, research results showed that the training package had sufficient content validity in the opinion of experts. In the quantitative part, the results manifested that by controlling the pre-test, the training package of physical-motor activities caused a significant improvement in the handwriting problems in the experimental group compared to the control group (p=0.001).

Overall the result of the present study showed that physical-motor activities training program has positive effects on handwriting problems of children with ADHD.