The Effectiveness of Child-centered Mindfulness on the Attention and Response Inhibition of Dysgraphia Students

Students with dysgraphia have deficits in attention and response inhibition, but not much attention has been paid to the treatment of these children's deficits, so the present study was conducted with the aim of determining the effectiveness of child-centered mindfulness on attention and response inhibition of students with dysgraphia.

The present study was a semi-experimental study with a pre-test and post-test design with a follow-up period with a control group. The research population included all second and third grade female students with dysgraphia in Tehran in the academic year of 2021-2022, who were referred from regular schools to educational and rehabilitation centers for special learning problems. 28 people were selected by multi-stage cluster random sampling method; And they were randomly placed in two experimental and control groups and responded to Yaqoubi et al.'s dysgraphia diagnostic questionnaires (2021), Mandy Brackencamp's selective attention, concentration and effort test (2002) and Bruno-Nero Hoffman test (1984). Then, the experimental group received the child-centered mindfulness training program for 10 sessions of 60 minutes, but only school training was provided to the control group. After the training sessions, the post-test was conducted. For data analysis, repeated measurement test was used with SPSS version 24 software at a significance level of 0.05.

The results showed that by controlling the effect of the pre-test, there was a significant difference between the average post-test scores of the experimental and control groups in attention and response inhibition variables, and these results continued in the follow-up period (P<0.01).

It can be said that the child-centered mindfulness program was effective in improving the attention and response inhibition of dyslexic students. Therefore, it is suggested to use the child-centered mindfulness treatment method in clinics and psychological service centers as an effective intervention method.