Abstract:

Diagnosis of school maturity and school readiness in the Czech Republic is often associated with so-called postponement of school attendance which annually provokes a wave of discussions between professionals, parents and the general public. Statistics from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports have long reported more than 20% of children who start primary school a year later due to the granting of a postponement of school attendance, i.e. at the age of seven. However, these are not only children with disabilities, such as visual, hearing, mental, autism, speech defects, but also intact children.

One of the areas that is mapped in the diagnosis of postponement of school maturity is visual perception. Sufficiently developed visual perception in all its components is a basic prerequisite for successful acquisition of reading and writing. Therefore, it is also part of the preschool curriculum.

In connection with the inclusive trend of Czech education, we focused on the diagnosis of school readiness of children with disabilities and their intact peers. The research group consisted of 25 children with visual impairments, 20 children with speech defects and 27 intact peers, all aged up to 5 years and 6 months up to 7 years and 5 months.

We present partial results of the research survey, which are focused not only on the overall level of visual perception in all three groups, but also its partial components of visual discrimination, visual memory, spatial relationships, shape stability, sequential memory, figure-background and shape closure.

The statistical processing shows that there are statistically significant differences in the significance level of 0.05 between the results of visually impaired children and children with speech defects and the control group of intact peers. Upon closer examination of the individual sub-areas of visual perception, it was found that only in the area of closed shape there is no statistically significant difference in the observed groups of pupils.

Keywords:

Visual perception, child with visual impairment, child with speech impairment, intact peers, postponement of school attendance.