THE INFLUENCE OF PRESCHOOL EDUCATION ON THE GENERAL KNOWLEDGE OF STUDENTS WITH A MILD DEGREE OF INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

Abstract

People with mild degrees of intellectual disabilities are not always easy to distinguish from people without intellectual disabilities. Most of such persons show no signs of brain pathology and belong to families with low formal education and lower socioeconomic status. The aim of this paper is to examine the level of school readiness of students with mild intellectual disabilities, and to determine whether there are differences between students who were included in preschool education and students who were not included in preschool education, in the field of "General Knowledge". The research was conducted on a sample of 60 students with mild intellectual disabilities, both genders, attending I and II grade. The sample of respondents was divided into two subsamples: students with mild intellectual disabilities who were included in preschool education (N = 25) and students who were not included in preschool education (N = 35). The study was conducted via the DABERON-2 test (Danzer, Frances Gerber, Lyonsi Voress, 1991). The test was designed for the examination of ten areas, however, for the purposes of this research, a part of the test related to the examination of the area "General Knowledge" was singled out. The maximum number of points that can be achieved in this area is 30. The results were presented by descriptive statistics, and the differences of the respondents were calculated via the t-test. Students with mild intellectual disabilities who didn't attend preschool education, in the summary variable of the area "General Knowledge", achieved an average score of 22.2 with a standard deviation of 4.8, while students with the same disabilities who did attend preschool education achieved an average score of 18.3, with a standard deviation of 7.9. The results of the t-test showed that there is a statistically significant difference between these groups of respondents, at the level of significance (p <0.01).