Psychomotor disorders in children of zone 4: Manabí and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, Ecuador

Abstract

Introduction: The psychomotor alterations constitute the cognitive, emotional, symbolic and sensorial motor interactions responsible for the motor and social skills, fundamental for the integral development of the person. Objective: To identify the index and typologies of psychomotor disorders in basic education students; as well as exploring the relationship between the dimensions of psychomotricity and sex. Materials and Methods: A descriptive and correlational study that demonstrates the reality of the psychomotor development of the children of the provinces of Manabí and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas-Ecuador, of zone 4, referring to the attention of priority groups, selected for this research, during the first semester of 2018. The investigated were 466 schoolchildren, 253 male and 213 female, from 2 educational centers. The instrument used was Da Fonseca's battery, designed to assess children between 4 and 12 years old, which detects psychomotor alterations, through 7 dimensions: tonicity, balance, notion of the body, laterality, spatio-temporal structuring, global praxia and fine praxia. A distribution of frequencies according to dimension was carried out and the relationship between sex and dimensions was evaluated by T-student and ANOVA tests. Results: The results indicate that 295 schoolchildren (63%) of the studied population present at least some psychomotor disorders, which were distributed according to dimension as follows: in tonicity 131 (45.01%); balance, 165 (55.93%); notion of the body, 181 (61.35%); spatio-temporal structure, 236 (80%); global praxia, 283 (95.93%) and fine praxia 268 (90.84%). Regarding the sex variable, the children presented significantly higher risk than the girls in the tonicity (p=0.018) and global praxia (p=0.042) dimensions, according to Student's T, confirmed with ANOVA. Conclusion: more than half of the students studied, have alterations in one or more of the dimensions of psychomotricity. There is a significant relationship between the dimensions of tonicity, global praxia and the sex variable, being the male with the highest incidence.