Possibilities of Investigating on the Physical Development of Visually Impaired Children

Abstract

Sport is one of the most useful and, I could say, necessary activities a person should perform. Work-out could take various forms and could be performed in various places, while the benefits thereof are enormous. When it comes to visually impaired people, the significance of sports becomes more complex. This paper represents an investigation of the physical, motor and functional development level of several approx.11-year-old, visually impaired students. With the purpose of identifying the extent to which the Dancesport could influence the bio-motor developmentof the visually impaired persons, we applied a set of measurement and assessment tests to the students of the Gymnasium for Visually Impaired Students of Bucharest who take dance lessons with me: (waist, weight, proportionality index, FC, Ruffier test, 25/50m, 600m, length without impetus, squats; body liftingfrom the supine position; body extensionfrom the prone position; push-ups; Matorin Test; Flamingo Test). As comparison references, I used the data obtained at national level for the same tests, results taken from the Paper “Report on the Assessment of the Somatic, Functional and Motor Potential of the Romanian School Population” (Cojocaru, V., Coordinator, 2015, p. 366-367). To verify whether the difference between the averages obtained for the visually impaired students and the average students is relevant from the statistical point of view, we also performed the Student Test. The research was mainly focused on the verification of the following working hypothesis: the investigation of the general motor level of the visually impairedstudents and the comparison thereof with the level of unimpaired children, creates objective premisesin the preparation of an efficient didactic strategy for the performance of the dance activities in this category of students with special educational needs, for the purpose of increasing the quality of their life. The work highlights that, for themoment, the fragmentary force level of the visually impairedstudents that made the objectof this research is a lot under the national average, which also includes students with CEZ. This stands as a real problem in what concerns the performance of any sport, the integration in the society and the chance to a better quality of life, however, this problem can be remedied by efficient didactic strategies, focused on skill development.