Abstract

The article presents the results of experimental work aimed at studying personal and social adjustment of a child with disabilities. Analysis of domestic and foreign psychological and educational literature allowed us to determine the key concept of the study, namely “social and personal orientation”, as a trait of a human’s personality, providing the ability to perceive the social environment, be involved into this environment and to master a variety of activities. The availability of this trait helps a child with disabilities to adapt into present-day social medium, thus solving the problem of his socialization. The paper describes the structure of readiness for personal and social adjustment, represented by personal, cognitive and activity components. A methodology of summative assessment,  aimed at exploring the level of maturity of each of these components, as well as their integrity in the overall readiness structure, was  designed and developed with due consideration of these components. Criteria and evaluation indicators, as well as special techniques (survey, interview and practice-oriented task) were selected to identify the level of maturity of each readiness component (high, medium, low and immature). The article presents the results of summative assessment, conducted with the help of the developed technique. Generalization of the obtained results indicates that the majority of children with disabilities, who were tested in the experiment, have low level of personal, cognitive and activity readiness components for personal and social adjustment. This suggests that pupils with disabilities show interest in contemporary social and welfare changes in a society, but do not seek to cognize the social medium on their own; moreover, most of them are immature in terms of knowledge of objects and phenomena of social realm; they have no need to expand the sources of information that would allow them to explore the world and various types of social and personal activities. In this regard, there appears a necessity to develop and implement targeted correction pedagogic work, providing formation of such a socialization mechanism, as personal and social adjustment that must be implemented under conditions of educational institutions, where today are taught many children with disabilities.

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