부산대학교 도서관

(Abstract)The aim of this study was to examine the effect of horticultural therapy on self-expression and creativity of the mentally challenged adolescents. The mentally challenged adolescents are those whose intellectual ability is not properly developed and it affects their academic performance and social capability. They also have limited communication capacity and show various defects in social skills. Moreover people who have accumulated experiences of failure tend to set lower demands and goals to avoid another failure, raising high failure probability. Such problem affects the mentally challenged adolescents negatively on the development of their self-expression and creativity. Thus a horticultural therapy is applied in this study to examine its effect on self-expression and creativity of the mentally challenged adolescents.As for the research methods, a horticultural therapy was designed for and conducted with the mentally challenged adolescents to improve their self-expression and creativity in the course of September 2nd to December 30th in 2009.The assessment results of the horticultural therapy on the self-expression of the mentally challenged adolescents are as follows. The test scores of the control group after the horticultural therapy were higher than those before the therapy, however, the former were lower in sub-category areas. No significant change was identified in the linguistic and non-linguistic areas. As for the experiment group, post-test scores increased to 68.33 compared with the pre-test scores of 65.00. Among sub-category areas, non-linguistic area showed a significant increase by 1.16 from 12.17 to 13.33(p