Speaking about mental retardation, experts mean “unstable, reversible mental development and a slowdown in its pace, which is expressed in insufficiency total stock knowledge, limited ideas, immaturity of thinking, little intellectual focus, predominance of gaming interests, etc."
The study of the problem of ZPR began in the 1950s with the work of G.E. Sukhareva. The term itself was introduced by T.A. Vlasov and M.S. Pevzner in the 1960s - 1970s. In their works, this term meant a time delay mental development. Interestingly, there is no analogue term in the world, despite the presence of a group of children with a borderline zone mental retardation(IQ = 70-80), occupying an intermediate position between oligophrenia and the intellectual norm.
With all this, it is determined that intellectual disability in case of mental retardation, it is characterized by persistence of manifestation and is caused to a greater extent by immaturity of regulation mental processes, memory impairment, attention, mental performance, emotional-volitional sphere.
In the etiology of mental retardation, the following play a role: constitutional factors, chronic somatic diseases, pregnancy pathology, abnormal childbirth, frequent illnesses in the first years of life, and unfavorable upbringing conditions.
It is clear that children with mild residual effects of organic damage to the central nervous system, expressed in increased exhaustion and causing reduced performance, lack of voluntary attention, its volume and concentration, inertia of mental processes, poor switchability, excitability, motor disinhibition or, conversely, lethargy, passivity, lethargy, need special correctional work.
Mental retardation is a borderline form of intellectual disability, personal immaturity, a mild impairment of the cognitive sphere, a syndrome of temporary lag of the psyche as a whole or its individual functions (motor, sensory, speech, emotional, volitional). Is not clinical form, but a slow pace of development.
Mental retardation is one of the most common forms of mental pathology childhood. More often it is detected with the beginning of the child’s education in preparatory group kindergarten or at school (7 - 10 years - a period of great diagnostic capabilities).
The term “delay” emphasizes the temporary (discrepancy between the level of mental development and the child’s passport age) and at the same time temporary nature of the lag itself, which is overcome with age, and the more successfully the earlier special conditions for the education and upbringing of the child are created.
Mental retardation manifests itself in the discrepancy between a child’s intellectual capabilities and his age. These children are not ready to start school i.e. their knowledge and skills do not correspond to the required level, and there is also personal immaturity and inconsistent behavior.
An examination by motor specialists of children with mental retardation revealed the following patterns in the lag in their physical development:
§ hyper- or hypodynamia;
§ muscle tension or decreased muscle tone;
§ violation of general motor skills, expressed in insufficient motor qualities, especially acyclic movements (jumping, throwing, etc.);
§ violation of manual motor skills;
§ general stiffness and slowness of movements;
§ incoordination of movements;
§ unformed equilibrium function;
§ insufficient development of a sense of rhythm;
§ violation of orientation in space;
§ slowness of the process of mastering new movements;
§ poor posture, flat feet.
Characteristic features of children with mental retardation:
§ decreased performance;
§ increased exhaustibility;
§ instability of attention;
§ more low level development of perception;
§ insufficient productivity of voluntary memory;
§ lag in the development of all forms of thinking;
§ defects in sound pronunciation;
§ peculiar behavior;
§ poor lexicon;
§ low self-control skill;
§ immaturity of the emotional-volitional sphere;
§ limited stock general information and performances;
§ poor reading technique;
§ unsatisfactory calligraphy skills;
§ difficulties in counting by 10, solving problems.
1. T.A. Vlasov and M.S. Pevzner identified the two most numerous groups and characterized them as:
§ children with psychophysical infantilism. These are children with impaired rates of physical and mental development. ZPR caused by the slow rate of maturation of the frontal region of the cerebral cortex and its connections with other areas of the cortex and subcortex;
§ children with mental infantilism. These are students with functional disorders mental activity (cerebroasthenic conditions), as a consequence brain injuries.
2. Forms of intellectual disability in children with mental retardation:
§ intellectual impairment due to unfavorable environmental and educational conditions or behavioral pathology;
§ intellectual impairments in long-term asthenic conditions caused by somatic diseases;
§ violations when various forms infantilism;
§ secondary intellectual disability due to damage to hearing, vision, speech defects, reading, writing;
§ functional-dynamic intellectual impairments in children in the residual stage and long term infections and injuries of the central nervous system.
3. K.S. Lebedinskaya proposed a clinical taxonomy of children with mental retardation:
§ ZPR of constitutional origin.
§ ZPR of somatogenic origin.
§ ZPR psychogenic origin.
§ ZPR of cerebroorganic origin.
All options differ in their structure and correlation: the type of infantilism and the nature of neurodynamic disorders.
Reasons for mental retardation:
§ mild organic brain damage, congenital or occurring in the prenatal state, during childbirth or early periods child's life;
§ genetically determined central nervous system failure;
§ intoxication, infections, injuries, metabolic and trophic disorders;
§ unfavorable social factors (upbringing conditions, attention deficit).
Children with mental retardation have a low (compared to normally developing peers) level of perception development. This is manifested in the need for a longer time to receive and process sensory information; in the insufficiency and fragmentation of these children’s knowledge about the world around them; in difficulties in recognizing objects in an unusual position, contour and schematic images. The similar qualities of these objects are usually perceived by them as the same. These children do not always recognize and often mix letters of similar design and their individual elements; combinations of letters are often mistakenly perceived, etc.
At the stage of beginning systematic education in children with mental retardation, the inferiority of subtle forms of visual and auditory perception, insufficient planning and execution of complex motor programs.
Children in this group also have insufficiently formed spatial concepts: orientation in spatial directions for a fairly long period is carried out at the level of practical actions; Difficulties often arise in spatial analysis and synthesis of the situation.
Researchers note that the most characteristic features of attention for children with mental retardation are its instability, absent-mindedness, low concentration, switching difficulties.
A decrease in the ability to distribute and concentrate attention is especially evident in conditions when the task is performed in the presence of simultaneous speech stimuli that have significant semantic and emotional content for children.
Disadvantages in organizing attention are caused by the weak development of children's intellectual activity, imperfect skills and abilities of self-control, and insufficient development of a sense of responsibility and interest in learning. Children with mental retardation have uneven and slow development of sustained attention, as well as a wide range of individual and age differences in this quality. There are shortcomings in analysis when performing tasks under conditions of increased speed of material perception, when differentiation of similar stimuli becomes difficult. The complication of working conditions leads to a significant slowdown in task completion, but the productivity of activity decreases slightly.
Another characteristic sign of mental retardation is deviations in memory development. There is a decrease in memorization productivity and its instability; greater preservation of involuntary memory compared to voluntary; a noticeable predominance of visual memory over verbal; low level of self-control in the process of memorization and reproduction, inability to organize one’s work; insufficient cognitive activity and focus when remembering and reproducing; poor ability to use rational memorization techniques; insufficient volume and accuracy of memorization; low level of indirect memorization; the predominance of mechanical memorization over verbal-logical. Among the violations short term memory- increased inhibition of traces under the influence of noise and internal interference (mutual influence of various mnemonic traces on each other); rapid forgetting of material and low speed memorization.
A pronounced lag and originality is also revealed in the development of the cognitive activity of these children, starting with the early forms of thinking - visual-effective and visual-figurative. Children can successfully classify objects according to such visual features as color and shape, but with great difficulty they identify the material and size of objects as general features, they have difficulty in abstracting one feature and consciously contrasting it with others, in switching from one principle of classification to another. When analyzing an object or phenomenon, children name only superficial, unimportant qualities with insufficient completeness and accuracy. As a result, children with mental retardation identify almost half as many features in an image as their typically developing peers.
Another feature of the thinking of children with mental retardation is a decrease in cognitive activity. Some children practically do not ask questions about objects and phenomena of the surrounding reality. These are slow, passive children with slow speech. Other children ask questions mainly related to external properties surrounding objects. They are usually somewhat disinhibited and verbose. Particularly low cognitive activity manifests itself in relation to objects and phenomena located outside the circle determined by adults.
Children in this category also have a violation of the necessary step-by-step control over the activity being performed; they often do not notice the discrepancy between their work and the proposed model, and do not always find the mistakes made, even after asking an adult to check the work done. These children are very rarely able to adequately evaluate their work and correctly motivate their assessment, which is often overestimated.
Children with mental retardation also have a reduced need to communicate with both peers and adults. Most of them exhibit increased anxiety towards the adults on whom they depend. Children almost do not strive to receive from adults an assessment of their qualities in a detailed form; they are usually satisfied with an assessment in the form of undifferentiated definitions (“ good boy", "well done"), as well as direct emotional approval (smile, stroking, etc.).
It should be noted that although children extremely rarely seek approval on their own initiative, for the most part they are very sensitive to affection, sympathy, and friendly attitude. Among the personal contacts of children with mental retardation, the simplest ones predominate. Children in this category have a decreased need to communicate with peers, as well as low efficiency of their communication with each other in all types of activities.
Schoolchildren with mental retardation have a weak emotional stability, violation of self-control in all types of activities, aggressive behavior and its provocative nature, difficulties in adapting to the children's group during games and activities, fussiness, frequent mood swings, uncertainty, feelings of fear, mannerisms, familiarity in relation to adults. Noted a large number of reactions directed against the will of the parents, frequent lack of correct understanding of one’s social role and positions, insufficient differentiation of persons and things, pronounced difficulties in distinguishing the most important features interpersonal relationships. All this indicates underdevelopment of this category of social maturity in children.
Speech is of extreme importance and versatility in the development of a child’s psyche. First of all, it is a means of communication in all its diversity of forms.
At the same time, it plays a crucial role in cognitive activity, acting both as a means and as a material for cognition, and as a material basis for consolidating and preserving the information received. Thus, speech serves as a means of introducing the child to the experience accumulated by humanity.
No less important is the regulating function of speech, which is important both in controlling the child’s activities by the people around him and in the formation of self-regulation of behavior.
Children with mental retardation back to the beginning school age do not experience difficulties at the level of basic everyday communication with adults and peers. They know the everyday vocabulary and grammatical forms necessary for this. However, the expansion of the vocabulary of addressed speech beyond the framework of repeatedly repeated everyday topics leads to a misunderstanding of some questions and instructions asked to the child, containing words whose meaning is unknown or not clear enough to the child, or grammatical forms that he has not mastered. Difficulties in understanding may be associated with pronunciation deficiencies, which are quite often observed in children with mental retardation. These shortcomings are usually not significant, mainly boiling down to vagueness, “blurredness” of speech, but they lead to defects in the analysis of the perceived speech material, which in turn leads to a lag in the formation of linguistic generalizations.
Speech deficiencies affect not only communication, but also the cognitive activity of children, which, being impaired, is further weakened by speech deficiencies.
Difficulties associated with speech impairments slow down cognitive activity intellectual development children in preschool age, and especially appear at the beginning of schooling: they manifest themselves directly in misunderstanding educational material, and in difficulties in mastering reading and writing. There are also difficulties in mastering new forms of speech: narration and reasoning.
GNOSTIC PROCESSES
FOR JUNIOR SCHOOL CHILDREN
WITH DELAYED MENTAL DEVELOPMENT
The main goal of psychological correction of primary schoolchildren with mental retardation is to optimize their intellectual activity by stimulating their mental processes and forming positive motivation for cognitive activity.
An important principle of psychological correction cognitive processes and the personality of children is to take into account the form and severity of mental development delay.
For example, in children with psychophysical infantilism, the determining role in the structure of the cognitive defect belongs to the underdevelopment of the motivational side of educational activity. Therefore, the psychocorrection process should be aimed at developing cognitive motives. And in children with mental retardation of cerebral-organic origin, there is a total underdevelopment of the prerequisites for intelligence: visual-spatial perception, memory, attention. In this regard, the correctional process should focus on the formation of these mental processes, on the development of self-control and activity regulation skills.
For the convenience of analyzing violations of cognitive activity, it is advisable to distinguish its three main blocks - motivational, regulatory and control block - and the tasks of the psychocorrection process corresponding to these violations (see Table 22).
Chapter 4. Psychological help children with mental retardation
Table 22 Directions and tasks of psychological correction of children with various forms of mental retardation
| Block name | Block content | Psychocorrectional tasks | ZPR forms |
| Motivational block | The child’s inability to identify, understand and accept the goals of action | Formation of cognitive motives: creation of problematic learning situations; stimulating the child’s activity in class; paying attention to the type of family upbringing. Techniques: creating game-based learning situations; didactic and educational games | Psychophysical infantilism of mental retardation of psychogenic origin |
| Regulation block | Inability to plan your activities in time and content | Teaching the child to plan his activities in time, pre-organizing orientations in tasks, pre-analyzing with the child the methods of activity used. Techniques: teaching children productive activities (designing, drawing, modeling, modeling) | Somatogenic forms of mental retardation Organic infantilism mental retardation of cerebral-organic origin |
| Control unit | The child’s inability to control his actions and make the necessary adjustments as they progress / | Performance-based monitoring training. Training in control by method of activity. Training in control in the process of activity. Techniques: 1 didactic games and exercises for attention, memory, observation; training in design and drawing from models | ZPR of cerebral-organic genesis Somatogenic form of ZPR Psychogenic form of ZPR |
Psychocorrectional classes for children with mental retardation on the development of cognitive processes can be conducted both individually and in a group. It is important to have the same requirements for the child from the teacher, psychologist and other specialists. This is successfully achieved with careful adherence to the daily routine, clear organization of the child’s daily life, eliminating the possibility of non-completion of actions begun by the child.
As noted above, with all forms of mental retardation, underdevelopment of attention is observed. It was also shown that various properties attention have a different impact on the success of children's learning in different subjects. For example, when studying mathematics, the leading role belongs to the volume of attention, the success of mastering reading is associated with the stability of attention, and the acquisition of the Russian language depends on the accuracy of the distribution of attention. Knowledge about these patterns is important in organizing the psychocorrectional process and selecting psychotechnical techniques. For example, to develop the distribution of attention, children can be presented with texts, and to develop volume - numbers and various mathematical problems.
Besides, different properties attention develop differently and manifest themselves differently in different forms of mental retardation. For example, studies show that in children with simple psychophysical infantilism, somatogenic and psychogenic forms of mental retardation, the amount of attention does not differ significantly from healthy children (Safadi Khasan, 1997; I. I. Mamaichuk, 2000). The distribution and stability of attention undergo significant changes not only in children with mental retardation of cerebral-organic origin, but also in children with other forms of mental retardation (Safadi Hassan, 1997; etc.).
Voluntary attention as a specific higher mental function is manifested in a child in the ability to control and regulate the progress of an activity and its results. In this regard, there is a need for psychological correction of attention in children in the process of activities available to them (play, study, communication). The systematic use of the psychotechnical techniques described below contributes to the formation of attentional properties in children.
The effectiveness of psychological correction of attention in children with mental retardation is largely determined by individual typological characteristics, in particular the properties of their higher nervous activity. Psychology has found that different combinations properties, no dashes were placed, but the syllables were pronounced with a clear separation (voice) and were consistently checked. The sound division of syllables became increasingly shorter and was soon reduced to stress on individual syllables. After this, the word was read and checked syllable by syllable to oneself (“the first is correct, the second is not, it’s missing here... rearranged”). Only on last stage we moved on to the child reading the entire word to himself and giving him overall assessment(right - wrong; if wrong, then explain why). After this, the transition to reading the entire phrase with its assessment, and then the entire paragraph (with the same assessment) was not difficult” (P. Ya. Galperin, 1987, pp. 97-98).
An important point The process of forming attention involves working with a special card on which the rules of verification and the order of operations when checking text are written down. The presence of such a card is a necessary material support for mastering the full action of control. As control is internalized and curtailed, the obligation to use such a card disappears. To generalize the formed control action, it is then practiced on wider material (pictures, patterns, sets of letters and numbers). After this, when creating special conditions, control is transferred from the situation of experimental learning to the real practice of educational activities. Thus, the stage-by-stage formation method allows you to obtain a full-fledged control action, that is, the formation of attention.
The essence of the method is to identify deficiencies in attention when errors are detected in the text. Completing this task does not require special knowledge and skills from children, but is ensured by the nature of the errors included in the text: substitution of letters, substitution of words in a sentence, elementary semantic errors.
For example, children are offered the following texts:
“Vegetables did not grow in the Far South of our country, but now they do. There are a lot of carrots growing in the garden. They didn’t breed near Moscow, but now they do. Vanya was hanging across the field, but suddenly stopped. Rooks build nests in trees. There were many toys hanging on the New Year tree. Hunter in the evening from hunting. Rai's notebook has good marks. Children were playing on the school playground. The boy was racing on a horse. A grasshopper chirps in the grass. In winter, the apple tree bloomed in the garden.” “The old swans bowed their mountain necks before him. In winter, apple trees bloomed in the garden. Adults and children crowded on the shore. Below them lay an icy desert. In response, I nod my hand at him. The sun reached the tops of the trees and hovered behind them. The weeds are effervescent and prolific. There was a map of our city on the table. The plane is here to help people. I soon succeeded in a car” (P. Ya.-Galperin, S. L. Kobylnitskaya, 1974).
The work is carried out as follows. Each child is given a text printed on a piece of paper and given instructions: “The text you received contains various errors, including semantic ones. Find them and fix them." Each student works independently and is given a certain amount of time to complete the task.
When analyzing the results of this work, it is important not only to quantitatively count the errors found, corrected and not detected, but also how the students perform the work: they immediately turn on V task, detecting and correcting errors as you read; they can’t turn on for a long time; on the first reading they don’t detect a single error; correcting the right for the wrong, etc.
Psychological correction of individual properties of attention is important, among which are: volume of attention, distribution of attention, stability of attention, concentration of attention, switching of attention.
Impaired mental function- an extreme variant of the norm, one of the types of dysontogenesis (disorders of ontogenetic development). Children with this diagnosis develop more slowly than their peers over several age periods. Developmental delays appear early. The original reason it may be alcoholism of parents, illness of the mother during pregnancy, birth injuries, infections suffered in the first months of life, and some others harmful factors, causing mild organic failure of the central nervous system. In Western psychology and neuropathology, this phenomenon is called minimal brain dysfunction.
Impaired mental function does not apply to persistent and irreversible types of mental underdevelopment: This is a temporary slowdown in the rate of development. The lag is overcome with age, and the more successfully the earlier correctional work with the child begins. Timely diagnosis and the creation of special conditions for education and training are very important. The best results in correctional work can be obtained when the child has not yet reached primary school age; classes with preschoolers are most effective. Unfortunately, parents often do not notice or do not attach importance to developmental delays before the child enters school. It is only at the beginning of learning that immaturity of thinking and emotional sphere, limited ideas and knowledge, lack of intellectual activity. The little student is unable to learn curriculum and becomes unsuccessful.
With mental retardation There are disturbances in both the emotional-need and intellectual spheres. But in some cases, emotional underdevelopment predominates, in others - disorders of cognitive activity. In general, the group of children with developmental delays is heterogeneous. Isolated most often two subgroups: children with mental retardation of constitutional origin (mental or psychophysical infantilism) and children with developmental retardation of cerebral-organic origin.
With developmental delay of constitutional origin younger schoolchildren even look similar to children of an earlier age - preschoolers. They are often physically less developed than their peers; they are distinguished by vivid emotional reactions, childlike spontaneity, greater suggestibility, lack of independence, and playful interests. The infantilism of the psyche does not give them the opportunity to adapt to the learning conditions - to engage in long-term intellectual activity in class and obey school rules of conduct. In 1st grade, children try to play during classes and violate discipline. As an example, we give excerpts from the characteristics of a child with mental infantilism.
“Alyosha A., 7.5 years old, entered the diagnostic group of the Institute of Defectology from the 1st grade of a public school. The complaints noted complete absence interest in school activities, significant learning difficulties, general restlessness and indiscipline. According to information received from the mother, it is known that the boy was born premature (7.5 months), was artificially fed, suffered chickenpox and whooping cough at an early age, had a metabolic disorder (diathesis), and the development of motor skills and speech was somewhat delayed...
Alyosha went to school at the age of 7, where from the very first days his complete unpreparedness for schooling: he did not understand the school situation, walked around during class, played with educational supplies, asked inappropriate questions, showed no interest in school activities and did not assimilate the program material... During his stay in the diagnostic group, a number of features emerged in Alyosha’s behavior and cognitive activity. He started his studies extremely reluctantly and could concentrate on them only for a very short period of time, and then only with the help of a teacher. During classes, he fidgeted, took out books, a pen, a pencil and played with them. During the lesson he chatted, asked a lot of questions, and did not listen to the answer. With childish spontaneity, he made comments to the students, asked for toys and permission to play. He was active in the game, but preferred active noisy games. In terms of his physical development, Alyosha lagged behind age standards and looked like a preschooler” (Vlasova T. A., Pevzner M. S., 1967, pp. 78-80).
Mental retardation of cerebral-organic origin turns out to be, as a rule, the most severe. Insufficient development of memory and attention, inertia of mental processes, their slowness and reduced switching ability cause significant impairments in cognitive activity. Unproductive thinking, lack of meaningful generalizations and underdevelopment of individual intellectual operations lead to the fact that sometimes children with developmental delays are incorrectly diagnosed with mental retardation.
“Nadya T., 8 years old, 2nd grade student at a auxiliary school. The girl comes from a family with a hereditary burden. Father is an alcoholic, paternal grandfather died in psychiatric hospital, and my father’s sister was mentally retarded. There is no inheritance on the mother's side...
At the age of 7, Nadya went to school, where from the very beginning she turned out to have difficult behavior. She did not obey school requirements, did not participate in classes, walked around the class during lessons, fought with children, went out into the corridor, had breakfast in class, and played with toys that she brought from home. During the entire first quarter, I did not learn a single letter or numerical order. The girl's range of ideas was extremely poor, her vocabulary was limited, although she had no speech defects. By the end of the first quarter, Nadya was sent for examination to a psychoneurologist. The latter noted that the girl had a decrease in mental abilities, insufficient orientation in her surroundings and a lack of basic school skills. Based on this, a diagnosis of mental retardation was made, and Nadya was sent to the 1st grade of a auxiliary school...
In the 1st grade, the teacher noticed that the girl was learning the material better than other students, and taught her individual plan. At the beginning of the second year of study, the teacher had doubts about Nadya’s mental retardation.
In this regard, the girl was sent for a medical and pedagogical examination...
The dynamics of development that emerged in Nadya show that the diagnosis of mental retardation and the subsequent transfer of the girl to a auxiliary school were erroneous. It is characterized only by a temporary delay in development” (Vlasova T. A., Pevzner M. S., 1967, pp. 83-85).
Children with developmental delay of cerebral-organic origin are often disinhibited and hyperexcitable; lethargy and emotional lethargy are less common. They may experience neurosis-like phenomena (fears, obsessive movements, stuttering, enuresis), unmotivated mood swings. Cerebroasthenic phenomena are common. This is increased exhaustion, a sharp decrease in performance, as well as vulnerability, tearfulness, and decreased mood. Let's give another example.
“Sasha A., 11 years old, a 3rd grade student at a public school, was sent to a children’s nervous sanatorium due to headaches, increased fatigue, stuttering and sharp decline performance at school...
At pre-preschool age, the boy had a slight developmental delay. From 9 months to 2.5 years, Sasha suffered from a number of childhood infectious diseases - whooping cough, measles, chickenpox and diphtheria twice... From the age of 3, Sasha developed a stutter...
Sasha entered school at the age of 7.5... The boy did not remember letters well and for a long time could not master syllabic reading. Writing was especially difficult for him. Sasha was transferred to 2nd grade, although he did not have sufficient knowledge and skills. In 2nd grade, at the end of the first quarter, Sasha fell from the third floor, receiving serious injury- a fracture of both arms, a jaw and a concussion... Since he was very behind in his studies, he was returned to the 1st grade, from which he was transferred to the 2nd. In 2nd grade, Sasha performed poorly in all subjects except reading, which he was interested in, but he was nevertheless transferred to 3rd grade. Here Sasha...could not cope with the program material at all...
The boy, due to the rapid onset of fatigue during training sessions, does not retain in his mind the phrase dictated to him, makes absurd mistakes in writing, does not remember the terms of the tasks, mechanically manipulates digital data, poses questions that do not correspond to the actions performed, and does not analyze the results obtained.
Sasha spent 3 months in a psychoneurological sanatorium... Complete elimination of all symptoms of cerebral asthenia for such short term failed to achieve. This is understandable, since Sasha had a slight developmental delay from the very beginning. early childhood; it was aggravated by the development of a stutter and then a concussion. Subsequently, this was accompanied by great pedagogical neglect” (Vlasova T. A., Pevzner M. S., 1967, pp. 98-100).
In addition to these two variants of developmental delay (constitutional and cerebral-organic origin), others are sometimes identified. K. S. Lebedinskaya considers also mental retardation of somatogenic origin(appears when chronic infections and allergies, heart defects, etc.) and psychogenic origin (associated with unfavorable upbringing conditions). It should be emphasized that a slowdown in the rate of mental development and the occurrence of deviations in the development of a child’s personality are possible only with prolonged and serious somatic insufficiency and extremely unfavorable upbringing, leading to pathological personality formation. Usually in other, less severe cases, only pedagogical neglect is observed, which does not represent a pathological phenomenon.
Mental retardation in junior schoolchildren.
The concept of mental retardation (MDD) is used in relation to children with minimal organic damage or functional insufficiency of the central nervous system. It can also be applied to children who are long time in conditions of social isolation from society or communication with a limited circle of people.
Children with mental retardation are characterized by immaturity of the emotional-volitional sphere and underdevelopment of cognitive activity. The above features are compensated under the influence of temporary therapeutic and pedagogical factors.
Scientists Vlasova T.A., Pevzner M.S. In their book “On Children with Developmental Disabilities,” they first described the diagnosis of mental retardation and introduced the term “psychological infantilism.”
There are two groups of children with mental retardation. The first group included children with impaired rates of physical and mental development. The delay is associated with a slower rate of maturation of the frontal region of the cerebral cortex and its connection with other areas of the cortex and subcortex. Such children are noticeably inferior to their peers both physically and mental development, are distinguished by infantilism in cognitive activity and in the volitional sphere. Difficulty getting involved educational activities, in the classroom they are characterized by rapid fatigue and low performance. The second group includes children with functional disorders of mental activity (cerebral-sthenic conditions), which most often arise due to brain injuries. These children are characterized by weakness of nervous processes, but at the same time deep violations They have no cognitive activity. During periods of stability, they achieve good academic results.
Scientists call the causes of mental retardation congenital causes(toxicosis during pregnancy, birth trauma, prematurity, infectious diseases at an early age, genetic predisposition and others) and acquired (limitation of life activity for a long time, mental trauma, unfavorable conditions in the family, pedagogical neglect).
In this regard, four variants of the ZPR are distinguished.
1. ZPR of constitutional origin, or harmonious infantilism. The child has an immature physique and at the same time mentality. Such children quickly get used to school, but do not understand the rules of behavior (they are late for classes, play in class, draw in notebooks). Doesn't respond to ratings. For him, the main thing is to have grades in the notebook. As a rule, due to immaturity, such children begin to lag behind in their studies from the very beginning. For such children, classes should be structured in a playful way.
2. ZPR of somatogenic origin occurs in connection with chronic diseases that have an impact on brain functions. Special regime does not allow them to socialize with peers. At school, children with this type of mental retardation experience serious difficulties in adaptation, are bored, and often cry. They are passive in class. Such children have no interest in the proposed tasks and have an inability and unwillingness to overcome difficulties. They do not show initiative and need constant pedagogical guidance, otherwise they will be disorganized and helpless. When children are very tired, headaches increase and there is no appetite, which is a reason for refusing to work. Children with somatogenic mental retardation need systematic medical and pedagogical assistance. It is best to place them in sanatorium-type schools or create a medicinal-pedagogical regime in ordinary classes.
3. Mental retardation of psychogenic origin is typical for children with pedagogical and family neglect - lack of maternal warmth, emotional distance reduces the child’s motivation, leads to superficial emotions, lack of independence in behavior. This form of mental retardation is typical for children from dysfunctional families, where there is no proper supervision over the child, where there is emotional rejection, but at the same time permissiveness. Parents influence the child through suppression and punishment. This state of the child becomes fertile ground for antisocial behavior. The child becomes passive, downtrodden, and feels increased anxiety. The teacher must show interest in such a child both in the presence of an individual approach and in the presence of intensive additional classes knowledge gaps are quickly filled. Consultation with social services is required.
4. ZPR of cerebro-organic origin manifests itself in children with organic damage to the central nervous system. The causes of the deviations are deviations in brain development due to pathology of pregnancy, fetal asphyxia, infections, birth injuries, alcoholism (drug addiction) of the mother, serious illnesses in the first year of life. Children with such mental retardation quickly get tired, they have reduced performance, poor concentration and memory. They absorb the material in fragments, and they quickly forget. Therefore, by the end of the school year they do not master the program. Education of children with mental retardation of cerebro-organic origin according to the usual program is not possible. They need corrective pedagogical support.
The issue of mental retardation is not very simple. It is important for a teacher not only to have a theoretical understanding of the problem, but also to seek help from specialists from the medical-pedagogical commission.
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