The Effect of Selected Exercise Group on Motor Skills and Cognitive Functions in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Introduction: the present study aimed to determine the effects of a selected group exercise on motor skills and cognitive function in children with autism spectrum disorders (asds). methods: forty children with asd aged 5-12 years participated in this quasi-experimental study. the bruininks–oseretsky test of motor proficiency (botmp), and the wisconsin card sorting test (wcst) were performed in 3 assessment stages of baseline, pretest, and posttest in sports, play, and active recreation for kids (spark). the repeated-measures analysis of variance (anova) and analysis of covariance (ancova) were used for analyzing the collected data. results: the current research results demonstrated that the selected exercises presented positive effects on motor skills (p<0.05) in the studied subjects; however, they indicated no significant effects on their cognitive function (p>0.05). conclusion: according to the present study results, the spark’s training is effective on children with asds and severe mobility limitations; however, it presented no cognitive function improvement in the study participants.