The Effect of Sensory Motor Training in Preschool Children

When looking at the literature, sensory-motor skills, self-regulation, executive functions, cognitive styles, and school readiness are strongly related concepts. Self-regulation skills are closely related to the maturity of sensory-motor components. Therefore, it is important to provide sensory-motor training with self-regulation strategies. However, no study investigating the effects of self-regulation strategies combined with sensory-motor training on school readiness, self-regulation, executive functions, and cognitive styles could be found in the literature. Our study aims to examine the effect of self-regulation strategies and occupational therapy-based sensory-motor training on self-regulation, cognitive skills, and school readiness in preschool children. The research will be carried out in two preschool classrooms of students aged 5-6 years registered for the 2022-2023 academic year at Özel Mavi Umut Eğitim Kurumları in Istanbul. A total of 38 children will participate in the study, 19 in the intervention group and 19 in the control group. While the control group continues their preschool education, the intervention group will receive group interventions including self-regulation strategies and sensory-motor skills training for 1 hour, twice a week, for 10 weeks, in addition to their regular preschool education. Metropolitan School Readiness Test, Kansas Pre-School Self-Concept Scale Form A, Childhood Executive Function Inventory, Pre-School Self-Regulation Scale, Dunn Sensory Profile, and Bruininks-Oseretsky Short Form 2 will use to evaluate both the intervention and control groups at 10-week intervals. The data obtained from the evaluations will be analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) 22.0 version. If the data follows a normal distribution, the Paired Student\'s t-test will be used for comparison, and if not, the Wilcoxon Matched Two-Sample Test will be used. Mean±standard deviation (X±SD) will be determined for the identified variables. A statistical significance level of p≤0.05 will be considered.