| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺南大學 === 特殊教育學系碩士班 === 101 === The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of walking training on the health-related physical fitness for the elementary school students with intellectual disabilities. Participants were two male students with moderate intellectual disabilities, aged 12 years. This research used an ABA design of the single-subject experimental designs, including the baseline phases (2 weeks), the intervention phases (10 weeks), and the maintenance phases (2 weeks). The independent variable was walking training at 8：40~9：20 from Monday to Friday. The researcher and an observer indicated participants to walk at least 30mins on the playground and used three strategies for intervention phases: 1) peer interaction, 2) prompts and 3) reinforcement applications. The dependent variables involved two goals： The effects of health-related physical fitness by using pretest/posttest assessment and walking performance. Data were collected from Visual analysis, C statistics, and the effect size, social validity analysis, and questionnaire. The results of this study were summarized as followings:
1. The findings found that participants became improved in cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular endurance and flexibility through walking training. BMI reduced (from 13.61 to 13.54) in subject A and increased (from 15.82 to 15.89) in subject B was also found in this study.
2. Based on visual analysis, C statistics, and the effect size, analyses revealed that walking performance had statistically significant relationship with walking training in intervention phases (p＜.01), had declined in the maintenance phases. In addition, participants must be instructed initially by teacher’s verbal prompts and physical assistance, graduall needed teacher’s verbal prompts, and subject A completed independently on post-intervention phases.
3. The social validation of this study, the "comparisons with normative students" and "real-life test" were adopted to understand the effectiveness of intervention. The findings revealed that participants were still lower than their peers (aged 12 yrs) in BMI, cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular endurance. About flexibility, subject A was still lower than their peers, and subject B still was superior to their peers. This study also found that participants showed walking performance acquisition without keeping. However, based on direct observation and questionnaire assessment, special education teachers provided that participants showed willingness to walking, as well as their walking habits and postures in the maintenance phases.
Based on these findings, some recommendations for future teaching and research are proposed to be of help to those who are special education teachers in elementary school.
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