Development of an elementary school participation checklist for Japanese children requiring special needs education

ABSTRACT

Purpose: This study aimed to develop an ‘elementary school participation checklist’ for children with developmental disorders requiring special needs education.

Methods: A pilot version was used to survey 539 parents of elementary school students, including children who were suspected of having developmental disabilities. Thereafter, the results were factor-analyzed and a checklist was created. The results of 10 children with developmental disorders who are currently under special needs education were compared.

Results: After excluding items with a factor loading of less than 0.5, a refined 15-item version checklist was created. The median total scores for elementary school students and children with developmental disorders were 22 and 33 points, respectively.

Conclusion: Cronbach’ s alpha coefficients for each of these separate factors were 0.7 and above, confirming construct validity and internal consistency. Further research of criterion-related validity will be necessary to investigate the use of this checklist as a scale.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• developmental disorders
• occupational therapy
• participation
• special needs education

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank all the parents and Japanese children as well as the occupational therapists and clinical psychologists who cooperated in the survey enabling the implementation of this study. The authors express their deep gratitude to all who cooperated in the present study, the parents and children who were kind enough to participate in this survey, and the OTs and clinical psychologists who generously provided their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).