FAIRYTALES CREATION POSSIBILITIES OF CHILDREN WITH ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER IN DIAGNOSTICS OF PSYCHO-SOCIAL AND COGNITIVE SPHERE

Methods of fairy tales could be applied not only for educational aims but also for diagnostics in socio educational practice. Analysis of children's created fairy tales is one of the ways to know his/her inner and outer worlds. Child's emotional state could be evaluated from his/her created fairy tale text. Child's created fairy tales show his/her social skills and allow to evaluate cognitive sphere. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder tend to have cognitive processes dysfunctions and lack of social skills. During the research, fairytales created by two groups of children were assessed. The first group was represented by primary forms pupils with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the other group consisted “natural” population children of the same age. The fairytale content analysis helped to disclose the tendency that in the group of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder positive psycho-social content of fairytales seldom predominates. Their fairy tales were with less developed consistency, simple sentences, and from the cognitive point of view less “mature”. The paper discusses the application possibilities of projective methodology – fairytale creation on the basis of visual stimulus – in assessment of children's with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) cognitive sphere and psycho-social sphere. The authors point out that so far educational science both in Lithuania and abroad lacks methodologies of analyzing fairytales created by children.