The programs of the psycho-pedagogical centers and their role in the development of some life skills for the learnable mentally handicapped -A field study in some of the eastern Algerian Wilayas-

Abstract

This study aimed to illustrate the role of programs applied in the Psycho-pedagogical centers to develop some life skills for learnable mentally handicapped persons from the educators’ point of view. Also, this study aimed to reveal the existence of the differences in the educators’ points of view on this role due to the variables; sex, seniority, and workplace. To this end, a questionnaire has been prepared to assess the life skills of the learnable mentally handicapped including 57 items divided into four dimensions; Independence, Communication, Social Skills and Teamwork and finally Control and Flexibility. After calculating its psychometric characteristics, the questionnaire has been applied to a sample of 68 educators distributed in a number of centers located in four Wilayas from the East of Algeria. Using the descriptive methodology, along with the arithmetic mean, standard deviations, analysis of mono-variance, and T test as statistical treatment, the results showed that the role of these programs was average for the total score of the questionnaire and most of its dimensions and that the ranking of life skills, according to their importance, was as follows: Social skills and teamwork followed by the skill of independence, then communication, and finally the skill of control and flexibility. In addition, the study showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the role of programs attributed to the two variables (gender and seniority) while there were statistically significant differences in the role of programs due to the variable of the workplace.