INVESTIGATING THE SCHOOL FUNCTIONING OF CHILDREN WITH CEREBRAL PALSY

Research Objectives: Even though there have been substantially effective applications aimed at improving the overall functioning ofchildren with Cerebral Palsy (CP) in school, these application’s direct translation to school functioning isquestionable. It was aimed to investigate the school functioning of children with CP, compared with healthypeers.

Design: This study is a study comparing the school functions of children with cerebral palsy and children with normal development.

Setting: This study was carried out in Hacettepe University Faculty of Health Sciences, Occupational Therapy Department, Pediatric Occupational Therapy Unit.

Participants: A total of 40 children with CP and 100 healthy children were included in the study.

Interventions: no intervention.

Main Outcome Measures: The school functioning was assessed with the School Function Assessment (SFA). The SFA has 3 domains named; Participation, Task Assistances and Performance. The Task Assistances domain provides scores regarding physical and cognitive assistance and adaptations. The Performance domain provides scores regarding the child’s performance in 21different school activities. A lower score from each domain indicates a worse school functioning for the child. None of the 26 sub-scores of the SFA had normal distribution, therefore all comparisons between the healthy children and the children with CP were conducted using the Mann-Whitney U test.

Results: There were no differences between the children with CP and the healthy participants regarding age (p=0.687)or gender (p=0.493). Participants with CP had significantly lower scores in all of the 26 sub-scores of the SFA compared to their healthy peers (p < 0.001 for all comparisons).

Conclusions: It is evident from the results of this study that even though there are comprehensive regulations and applications which were developed to ensure the equal functioning of children with CP in school settings, these children still fall significantly behind their healthy peers in all domains of school functioning.

Author(s) Disclosures: There is no author conflict.