Developing a Child-Centered Neuropsychological EarlyInterventions Package and Assessing Its Effectiveness on the Performance of Children with Developmental Cognitive Delay

Abstract

Abstract The aim of the present study was to develop a child-centered neuropsychological Earlyinterventions package and to assess its effectiveness on the performance of children with developmental cognitive delay. The research method was a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with follow-up and control group. The research population consisted of 4-6 year-old children with developmental delay who were under training in kindergartens and preschool centers in Tabriz. The multistage random sampling method was employed in such a way that three regions were selected randomly and from each of them, three kindergartens and pre-school centers were randomly selected. The interventions were designed by the researchers. Then, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-3 (WPPSI-III) was administered on children for screening, and the number of 30 students with development cognitive delays and enjoyed inclusion criteria were randomly selected and divided into two experimental and control groups. Afterwards, a 16-session child-centered neuropsychological intervention program was performed on the experimental group and the control group did not receive any intervention. Data were analyzed by the repeated measures ANOVA using SPSS- 22. The results indicated that there was a significant difference between the subjects in the experimental group and control group in terms of linguistic performance in post-test and follow up stages (P <0.05). As a result, it can be concluded that a child-centered neuropsychological interventions package has led to an increase in linguistic performance in children with developmental cognitive delays.

Keywords

• "early intervention"
• "neuropsychological"
• "developmental delay"
• "linguistic performance"