The Efficacy of Sensory Integration Therapy for Children with Learning Disability

This study was designed to compare the effect of sensory integration therapy (SI), perceptual-motor training (PM) and no-treatment (NT) on the performance of 30 children with learning disability and sensory integrative dysfunction, aged 72 to 99 months, who were randomly assigned to one of the two treatments or no-treatment. After recieving 24 one-hour weekly sessions of therapy, SI-treated subjects made significant gains over the other two groups in selected aspects of sensorimotor functioning that showed some consistency with SI theory. No group differences were evident in higher level cognitive, language and academic performance. These results have implications for the validity of the sensory integration approach and therapists' expectations for the outcome of therapy.