Association between visual motor integration and handwriting among special need children at public school / Najwaa Ramlee

Background: Education is very important in an industrial and civilized society. Education is deliverer through school to give basic knowledge of reading, writing, listening, speaking, and numerical set of knowledge. Through education, the young mind will be trained to become productive and independent. Besides that, education also contributes to the development of the children to become confident, strong, and successful. Moreover, behaviour also was found to learn through education. Therefore children regardless of abilities should have access to school. However, school readiness is an issue especially for children with a special need. School readiness is motor development and physical well-being, emotional and social development, learning, speech and language development, and cognitive and general knowledge including math. Purpose: This dissertation focus on finding an association between visuomotor integration and handwriting skills at Public School in Putrajaya District. Methods: 35 special needs children ages 6 to 8 years old participated in this study. The Beery Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration (Beery VMI) and Minnesota Handwriting was the outcome measure been used in the study. Analysis: Spearman's Rho and Kruskal Wallis test was used for data analysis. Result: The result of this study showed that there is no correlation between the child age and Minnesota rate, there is no significant difference in mean Minnesota rate between the age group of 6.0- 6.11 years, 7.0- 7.11 years and 8.0 - 8.11 years, there is no significant difference between the parent level of education and handwriting skills, there is a weak positive correlation between the score of Beery VM1 and Minnesota Rate and Domain of Minnesota which show the significant result on correlation analysis to score of Beery VM1 were size. Conclusion: The current study found that visuomotor integration was more likely interrelated to the problem in handwriting among children. Children can develop these skills which are visual perception and finger hand movement, but then again they have trouble integrating between these two skills.