Programação de ensino de leitura e escrita para crianças com deficiência mental

Abstract

The importance of reading and spelling for citizens is a significant issue. However, repeatedly the school system shows failures in teaching these repertoires. When children with mental retardation are inserted in the regular classroom, the problems increase. Teachers don t know how to teach them academic skills, therefore obscuring their potential and prejudicing their social inclusion. Moreover, studies in equivalence of stimulus have systematically demonstrated the applicability of procedures based on this paradigm for individuals with mental retardation, as well as the effectiveness of similar methodologies applied to the teaching of rudimentary reading and spelling skills to other populations, such as preschool students and children with developmental disorders. Therefore, the objectives of this study were: a. to investigate the necessary conditions for the teaching of children with mental deficiency using a procedure designed to of teaching reading and spelling, and b. to redesign the software that contains this procedure in order to achieve results for the children with mental retardation compatible with the ones obtained by the application of this same software to children with school failures. A multiple baseline design with a mobile criterion, has been used, focusing the analysis on the three participants performance when exposed to the modifications implemented by the three consecutive procedures. The results indicated small profits for Procedure 1, when only formal modifications in the software were made, such as exchange of stimuli (words and pictures) and exhibition of the font in capital letters. As the second procedure introduced more structural modifications, as blocked-trial trainings and auditory-visual trials with critical differences between the words, the results showed great success for all the reading and spelling skills tested. The last procedure made refinements in the program, and equally reached success with shorter trainings and bigger words. As a conclusion of the work, success was reached in the adaptation and application of the teaching program: the children with mental retardation showed results of reading and spelling compatible with the results the pupils with learning difficulties had shown in previous studies. Furthermore, it was also possible to say that the data obtained had contributed to understand a little more how and how much this students learn, and how this learning can be guaranteed and optimized using procedures based on matching to sample, constructed response matching to sample and exclusion.