Intervention approaches and children with developmental coordination disorder

Abstract

Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) have a marked impairment in the performance of functional motor skills required to succeed at school. Longitudinal studies show that without intervention children with DCD often do not improve with development and the poor motor behaviour appears to have a detrimental effect on other aspects of functioning such as school achievement, behaviour and self esteem. Outside of clinical situations, there are only a small number of controlled empirical investigations, and from this small number two types of approaches emerge. The first concentrates on processes underlying motor skills and purports to improve areas such as kinesthesis or sensory motor processes. The second concentrates on teaching functional tasks aiming to specifically intervene in the deficient areas. Evaluations of these approaches show that they both work, producing significant improvements over control groups but show no differences between other approaches. It is hypothesized that more general learning principles are producing the effect, such as accurate assessment and tailoring activities to meet the needs of any individual child. Further, it is suggested that work with non-specialists in the motor area, such as teachers and parents, is a way forward with all but the most severely affected children.

The use of the QNST–II as a measure for the identification of children with perceptual‐motor deficits

“…As occupational therapists, we view sensory and perceptual-motor abilities as being important foundational skills for the attainment of end-product abilities (that is, praxis, visual perception, language and articulation abilities, behaviour, activity level, and emotional tone) that are crucial for a child's school performance (Royeen & Marsh, 1988;Dunn, 1992;Duncan, 1998;Parham, 1998;Spitzer & Roley, 2001). The correlations that exist between these sensory-motor-perceptual abilities and school performance have been well verified in the scientific literature (Polatajko et al, 1991;Taylor et al, 1995;Fletcher-Flinn et al, 1997;Sugden and Chambers, 1998;Haskell, 2000;Rosenbaum et al, 2001), and in addition, research has shown that skill level in these areas can reliably discriminate between children with and without learning impairments (Rosenberg, 1989;Chiarenza, 1990;Murray et al, 1990;Fisher and Murray, 1991;Summerfield & Michie, 1993).…”

Psychosoziale Aspekte bei motorischen Behinderungen

“…Kinder mit motorischen Entwicklungsstörungen oder Behinderungen weisen sowohl im Bereich der Fähigkeiten als auch der Fertigkeiten motorische Einschränkungen auf. > Bei kombinierten Entwicklungsstörungen sind schulische, emotionale und soziale Probleme häufig Die Frage, ob motorische Entwicklungsstörungen mit Lernstörungen und Verhaltensauffälligkeiten einhergehen, wird kontrovers diskutiert [5,6,23]. Bei Kindern mit isolierten umschriebenen Entwicklungsstörungen der Motorik ergaben sich auf Datenbasis der Kurpfalzstudie [5] als Längsschnittstudie keine Hinweise auf Stö-rungen der kognitiven Leistungsfähigkeit und Schulentwicklung, bei jedoch leicht erhöhter Rate an emotionalen Auffälligkeiten.…”

Children with developmental coordination disorders

“…There is a body of literature that can point to success in intervention. [41][42][43] So far, there have been two major approaches to intervention, under different labels, but often referred to as either process-oriented or task-oriented approaches.…”