Study On The Understanding Level Of Safety Signs For Children With Mental Retardation And Its Influencing Factors

With the rapid development of the society,the environmental stimuli that people come into contact with are becoming more and more complicated,the incidence of accidental injuries is also increasing,and children are facing a large number of potential dangers.Among them,children with mental retardation inevitably face more safety risks than normal children due to their defects in intelligence and physical and mental development.This situation has aroused widespread concern.The curriculum standards and teaching materials for mental retardation incorporate safety education into the key objectives of mental retardation education.Safety signs have the characteristics of simple and intuitive images,which are more in line with the cognitive characteristics of mental retardation children’s image thinking,and are an important defense line for mental retardation children to deal with safety risks.However,safety sign is a simplified information carrier,which requires users to have a certain understanding and imagination to fully understand it.Looking up the previous literature,we found that there is a lack of direct research on the understanding of safety signs for children with intellectual disabilities,and there are deficiencies in research methods and research contents.Therefore,this study started to explore the understanding of the safety signs of children with intellectual disabilities and the influencing factors,providing theoretical support and practical experience for the follow-up teaching and research work.In this study,safety signs were collected from various sources,and parents and teachers with mental retardation were investigated and screened for important safety signs through the production of the questionnaire on the importance of safety signs for children with mental retardation.Referring to previous studies,the "Safety Signs Understanding Test for Children with Mental Retardation" was compiled.The form of selecting appropriate semantic options according to the graphic symbols of safety signs was used to investigate the understanding of safety signs by children with mental retardation from the perspective of semantic recognition,and one-on-one tests were conducted on children with mental retardation.And around the parents of children with intellectual disabilities,teachers,special education students and other relevant personnel to investigate,from the main factors and logo design characteristics of two aspects to explore the impact factors of children with intellectual disabilities to understand safety signs.Referring to the existing research and adaptation of the "Family Survey Questionnaire on Safety Signs for Mentally Handicapped Children",which includes parents’ attitudes,prior knowledge and direct experience,the parents of the mentally handicapped children participating in the test were investigated with the questionnaire.Adapting the existing research tool "Questionnaire on Evaluation of Design Characteristics of Safety Signs" to allow college students with relevant educational backgrounds,first-line special education teachers and relevant experts to grade five design characteristics of safety signs: familiarity,conciseness,concreteness,clarity and semantic proximity.Data processing,tool testing and statistical analysis were carried out on the comprehension test,logo design characteristic evaluation questionnaire and family questionnaire to explore the understanding level of children with intellectual disabilities on safety signs and the influence of logo design characteristics and main factors on the understanding level.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Through examination and statistical analysis,the "Safety Signs Understanding Test for Children with Mental Retardation" has good difficulty,discrimination,reliability and validity,and can effectively test the understanding level of safety signs for children with mental retardation.The test results show that children with mental retardation have a lower overall understanding of safety signs,and have significant differences in understanding of different types of safety signs.They have a higher understanding of prompt signs,followed by warning signs,and the worst understanding of prohibition signs.They also have different understanding of different safety signs in the same type.There are significant differences in the understanding level of safety signs among children with intellectual disabilities in the degree of impairment,but there are no significant differences in gender,age and grade.(2)After analysis,the Family Survey Questionnaire on Safety Signs for Children with Mental Retardation is suitable as a survey tool for the main factors that affect children with mental retardation to understand safety signs.Through the difference test and correlation analysis with the score of the safety sign understanding test for children with mental retardation,it is found that there is no significant difference in the level of safety sign understanding among different guardian identities,ages,cultures,jobs and places of residence.Among parents’ attitudes,prior knowledge and direct experience,only prior knowledge has significant correlation with the understanding level of safety signs,indicating that prior knowledge has significant influence on their understanding of safety signs.(3)This paper tests the differences between the "Questionnaire for Evaluation of Design Characteristics of Safety Signs" and the comprehension test scores of safety signs for children with intellectual disabilities.The results show that among the five design characteristics of signs,the comprehension levels of safety signs with different levels of simplicity,concreteness,clarity and semantic proximity are different.Among them,the differences in concreteness,clarity and semantic proximity are significant,the simplicity is significant,and the familiarity is not significant.This indicates that some design characteristics of signs have significant influence on the comprehension of safety signs for children with intellectual disabilities.According to the research results,some suggestions are put forward to the safety sign designers.For example,when designing the safety sign pattern,we should begin to improve from the aspects of concreteness and semantic proximity,and consider incorporating safe and correct,allowed behaviors and behavior consequences into the graphic symbols to enhance the intuition.It also puts forward relevant suggestions on the education and teaching of safety signs,and suggests parents and teachers of children with intellectual disabilities to strengthen the teaching of existing prohibited signs and warning signs in terms of educational content,and to pay attention to the teaching of safety signs with lower understanding level and the training of children with severe intellectual disabilities.We should pay full attention to the teaching of safety signs in concept,carry out teaching according to the physical and mental development characteristics,age characteristics and life reality of children with intellectual disabilities,make full use of multimedia in methods,and use rich sensory stimulation and environmental stimulation.