Students with Mental retardation are devoid of good working skills and attitude that are necessary for successful adjustment at work, and vocational education for them should focus on life experiences and provide basic knowledge mandatory for social a...
Students with Mental retardation are devoid of good working skills and attitude that are necessary for successful adjustment at work, and vocational education for them should focus on life experiences and provide basic knowledge mandatory for social adjustment. The purpose of this study was to examine whether or not life skill-based job performance activities could contribute to developing the physical abilities and work behaviors of students with mental retardation. The research questions were posed as below;
1. What are the effects of life skill-based job performance activities focusing on the physical ability of mentally retarded students?
2. What are the effects of life skill-based job performance activities focusing on the work behaviors of students with mental retardation?
The subjects of this study selected 10 boys and 10 girls who attended at T special school for children with mental retardation in the city of Ulsan. A job performance program that focused on life skills was conducted for about seven months, and pretest and posttest were implemented to determine its effects on physical abilities and work behaviors.
The program used in this study was prepared by rearranging Cho In- soo(1996)'s translated version of Shalock's independence and vocational training program and a pre-occupational training program. To identify its effects, the job skill segment of McCarron and Dail(1976)'s Survey of Functional Adaptive Behaviors(SFAB) was utilized, which included 25 items about physical abilities and 20 items about work behaviors.
For data handling, SPSS/PC+ 10.0 program for Windows was employed. Statistical data on mean and standard deviation were obtained to see if there were any gaps between the pretest and posttest results and if gender made any differences. Besides, t-test was utilized to check out the level of significance.
The findings of the study were as follows:
The job performance program that focused on life skills served to improve the physical abilities and work behaviors of students with mental retardation. Furthermore, that provided strong motivation to them and enhanced their practical problem-solving skills. Ultimately, however, no specific program couldn't address their every need, and there are some suggestions in that regard:
First, Life skill-based job performance activities focusing cannot be successful if school, family, local community and public institutes don't join force. All the parties concerned should team up with in letting students with mental retardation better settle in society.
Second, special school should offer more functional education. Given the fact students with mental retardation receive education primarily to have a job or improve their life skills, achievement-oriented education should be provided, and a wide variety of probable situations and themes should be handled.
Third, whether or not life skill-based job performance activities focusing could produce long-term transfer effects should be investigated, and what types of changes such a program could bring should be identified in detail.
Fourth, it's only attempted in this study to determine the effects of life skill-based job performance activities focusing on physical abilities and work behavior, and future research efforts should be put into finding out how such a program could affect other fields including occupational adjustment, job performance and vocational readiness.