Abstract:

At schools, integration can be perceived in the broad sense of the word as common teaching of standard population and children with special educational needs in mainstream schools. In the strict sense of the word, it is an individualized preparation of children with special educational needs for life in society. In addition to cognitive functions, both groups of pupils may also differ in their coordination abilities. The purpose of the study was to assess the levels of coordination abilities among pupils with special educational needs and to compare them with the performance of pupils from the standard population. The sample consisted of 24 elementary school pupils aged 11-15, of which 14 were pupils from the standard population and 18 were pupils with learning disabilities educated in regular classes. We administered the KTK (Körperkoordinations Test für Kinder) test battery (Schilling, Kiphard, 1974, 2007), which assesses the development of overall body coordination of children aged 5 to 14 years. Pupils were tested during physical and sports classes as part of the project VEGA 1/0120/19 entitled Movement correction of problematic behavior of pupils of standard population and pupils with special educational needs educated in conditions of integration. To analyze the collected data, we used the following statistical methods: Mann-Whitney test, Kruskal-Wallis test and ANOVA. When comparing the two samples of pupils, there were no significant differences in the level of coordination abilities between them, which suggests that pupils with learning disabilities perform similarly in this field as pupils from the standard population. The research data obtained will help to understand the needs of learners with learning disabilities and facilitate inclusion trends by stating that there are domains of learner development, such as the movement domain, that do not require different educational conditions. It is these areas that help to build a sense of self-confidence and self-esteem in these pupils, which can be disrupted by comparing their performance in other subjects with those from the standard population.

Keywords:

Sports education, pupil with special education needs, coordination ability.