Shenakht Journal of Psychology & Psychiatry

Abstract

Introduction: Mentally retarded children respond less to conventional therapies than normal people. Therefore, art therapy allows these children to express their emotion by an intermediary instrument which causes increase of adaptability and self-esteem. Purpose:  The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of coloring art using step by-step drawings on self-esteem of educable retarded children. Method:  The current research was a type of quasi-experimental study with non-equivalent groups (pretest, posttest) design. The population consists of all educable mentally retarded children were studying at especial schools of Tehran city in academic year 2013. The multistage random sampling method was used to determine the research sample size. Finally, from 20 educable mentally retarded students, 10 students were classified into the experimental group and 10 students were included in the control group. The Cooper-Smith’s self-esteem scale (filled by the students’ parents and teachers) and step-by step coloring drawings were reared by the researcher were utilized in order to increase the educable mentally retarded students’ self-esteem. The Cooper-Smith scale concentrates on increase of self-esteem. And in the inferential statistics section have been used from pre-test and post-test differential average and then T student test between two groups.  Results: The results indicated that step-by step coloring drawings positively affect the educable mentally retarded students’ self-esteem. Conclusion: Mentally retarded children are aware of their differences with others and forgetfulness verbal fields is more obvious than practical fields. Another common feature of them , is the impaired communication abilities, so they respond to common  treatments less so it make the necessity of using art more obvious

Key word: Effectiveness, Coloring art, Using step by-step, Drawings, Self-esteem, Educable retarded children