Background/Purpose: Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) have low motor skills that include marked delays in achieving motor milestones, poor balance, low coordination and handwriting difficulties. Because of the heterogeneous nature of this condition, it is difficult to develop a single profile of motor skill deficiencies in children with DCD and it remains unclear how a particular child with DCD may perform in an array of motor assessment batteries. To this end, we compared performance of children diagnosed with DCD through the use of three different assessments of motor skills.
Method: To confirm the DCD diagnosis, participants were first assessed with the Kaufman Brief Test of Intelligence – 2nd Edition (KBIT-2) and the Movement Assessment Battery for Children – 2nd Edition. All four children (3 males, 1 female, all 7-year-olds) were then tested with the Test of Gross Motor Development – 2nd Edition (TGMD-2), a process-oriented assessment for gross-motor skills; the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency – 2nd Edition (BOT-2), a product-oriented assessment for overall motor proficiency; and the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, 6th Edition (Beery-VMI-6), an assessment examining the extent to which individuals can integrate their visual and motor abilities.
Analysis/Results: On the KBIT-2, 2 children scored as “Average”, while one scored as “Above Average”, and the other was placed as “Upper Extreme”. All children scored in the Red Zone of the MABC-2, with two scoring on the 2nd and the remaining two scoring on the 0.5th percentile. On the motor assessments, all children performed below the 95th percentile in the TGMD-2, with three falling in the “Very Poor” category and only one scoring as “Poor”. All children scored Below Average in overall motor proficiency with the BOT-2, with substantial Below Average performance in the Bilateral Coordination and Balance subtests. With the Beery-VMI-6, all children but one scored in the “Average” category for visual-motor integration. However, when breaking down the scores into visual perception and manual coordination components, only one scored Below Average in visual perception, and all scored “Below Average” with one scoring “Very Low” on the Manual Coordination component.
Conclusions: In general, the results hint that low performance across an array of motor assessments is consistent in children with DCD. This steady low performance in multiple motor assessments can provide a pathway to understanding additional similarities within the disorder. Further studies are necessary to explore detection and consistency of motor difficulties in children with DCD.
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