Personal Component of Graphomotor Skills of Children Aged 5-8 Years

Abstract

Aim: to assess the personal component of graphomotor skills in children aged 5-8 years. The period of a child's individual development coincides with the beginning of schooling and is marked by increased sensitivity of the body to factors in the external environment, which can lead to disharmonious development and deterioration of health. This justifies the search for new approaches in the development of criteria for prognostic assessment of the development level of senior preschoolers and junior schoolers. The object of the research is the personality characteristics of children and the level of neuroticism. Material and methods. Students of grades 1–2 (6–8 years) and children of preschool age (5 years) from secondary schools and preschools in Sumy (Ukraine) (five secondary schools and four preschools in the city, 487 children were examined) participated in the study. Assessment of the level of neuroticism in children was performed using six scales reflecting the main aspects of the manifestation of neurotic changes in children: level of depression, asthenia, behavioral reactions, autonomic disorders, sleep disorders, and anxiety. Part of the simplest mathematical processing was performed on a personal computer using the standard statistical packages Statgrhics, STATISTICA (descriptive statistics, Student's test, correlation, variance and factor analyses; risk calculation). The Excel package was used for the initial preparation of tables and intermediate calculations. Results. For children aged 5–8 years with low levels of graphomotor skills, the scores of the scales "level of depression", "asthenia", "behavioral reactions", and "anxiety" were higher compared to the scores of the children with average levels of graphomotor skills. This conclusion was confirmed by the established direct correlation between the graphomotor skills indicator and emotional stability (r = 0.32, p < 0.01), which indicated an increase of children's emotional stability with an increase in the level of graphomotor skills formation. Conclusions. It has been established that the indicators of borderline neurotic disorders of children aged 5–8 years are at low levels of formation, that is, there are no signs of their manifestations, which indicates the absence of a decrease in vitality, low self-esteem, slow thinking, motor limitations, feelings of depression. The inverse correlation between the indicator of graphomotor skills and the average values of the "behavior disorder" scale indicates an increase in manifestations of hyperactivity of children when graphomotor skills are not formed (r = -0.22, p < 0.05).