The assessment of children with Developmental Coordination Disorders in the Netherlands: The relationship between the Movement Assessment Battery for Children and the Körperkoordinations Test für Kinder

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-9457(98)00019-0Get rights and content

Abstract

The Movement Assessment Battery for Children (Movement ABC; Henderson, S.E., Sugden, D.A., 1992. Movement Assessment Battery for children: Manual. Psychological Corporation, London.) is used throughout the world in the evaluation of children with movement difficulties. Within Europe, another test commonly used for the same purpose is the Körperkoordinations Test für Kinder (KTK; Kiphard, B.J., Schilling F., 1974 Körperkoordinations Test für Kinder. Beltz Test Gmbh, Weinheim.). The aims of this study were: (i) to take a preliminary look at the suitability of the published norms of these two tests for use with Dutch children, (ii) to examine the correlations between scores on the two tests and, (iii) to examine the concordance between the tests in detecting cases of impairment among children believed to be poorly coordinated. Two hundred and eight children completed both tests. The results suggested that the current norms for the Movement ABC are satisfactory for Dutch children but for the KTK, they may require adjustment. The overall correlation between the two tests was 0.62. Although there were children who failed one test and passed the other, the degree of concordance between the tests was statistically significant.
PsycINFO classification: 2221; 2330

Introduction

Motor competence is an important determinant of a child's educational progress as well as more general development. In most cultures, for example, learning in the early years is based on exploratory play which in turn involves movement. As the child gets older, the ability to write legibly and with adequate speed becomes a prerequisite for note taking and examination performance as well as being a component of more general literacy skills. In addition, lack of movement skill may exclude a child from playground games, leading to social isolation, loneliness, and even depression (Gillberg and Gillberg, 1989; Losse et al., 1991; Hellgren et al., 1994).

Within the school population, it is estimated that approximately 5% of the children fail to acquire sufficient movement skill to allow normal progress in school. This state of affairs is reflected in recent editions of the formal diagnostic manuals of the World Health Organisation, (WHO, 1992) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 1987, APA, 1994) which attempt, for the first time, to identify a developmental disorder of movement skill. Such recognition has not only raised awareness of the potential consequences of “clumsiness” but has also increased the demand for information on the most effective way to identify, diagnose and treat the children concerned. In the area of assessment, however, no single perceptuo-motor test is yet considered to be the “gold standard” and professionals use a variety of procedures ranging from very informal checklists to fully standardised tests.

The work described in this paper forms a part of an international collaborative programme concerned with the use of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (henceforth Movement ABC) (Henderson and Sugden, 1992) to assess coordination difficulties in children. The Movement ABC comprises a teacher's checklist, a standardised test and a set of guidelines for intervention. The standardised test and its predecessor, the Test of Motor Impairment (Stott et al., 1984) were founded on normative data collected in the UK, Canada and the USA, with the final version being standardised on over 1000 American children. A database containing information on the performance of more than 5000 children now exists and an annotated bibliography of studies employing the Movement ABC is currently in press (Barnett and Henderson, in press). The test manual has recently been translated into Swedish, Danish, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. A Dutch translation, including a full standardisation of the test, will be published later this year (Smits-Engelman, 1998).

In this preliminary study, we were concerned with the suitability of the Movement ABC for use with Dutch children and its comparison with another assessment instrument commonly used in the Netherlands, the Körperkoordinations Test für Kinder (literally translated as the Body Coordination test for Children and henceforth referred to by the acronym KTK). This test, constructed and standardised in Germany by Kiphard and Schilling (1974), was also designed to identify and diagnose problems of motor development in children. However, it differs from the Movement ABC in that it focuses exclusively on gross motor coordination whereas the Movement ABC contains both gross and fine motor tasks.

Our specific aims in the study were threefold. Our first objective was to take a preliminary look at the suitability of the published norms of the Movement ABC and the KTK for use with Dutch children. Our second objective was to examine the relationship between the constituents of the two tests. Our third objective was to examine the concordance between the tests in detecting cases of impairment among children believed to be poorly coordinated by parents or teachers.

Section snippets

Subjects

Two hundred and eight Dutch children participated in this study. They comprised two groups, as follows. A non-referred group of 134 children were randomly selected from normal mainstream schools throughout the Netherlands. None of the children had any known physical or neurological handicap. The age range of this sample was 5–13 years and 55% were boys.

A referred group of 74 children ranging in age from 5 to 12 years of whom 62% were boys. All of these had been referred to a physical therapist

Performance of the randomly selected children on the two tests

Although the 134 non-referred children in this study form only a small part of the full Dutch Movement ABC standardisation sample, the sampling procedure was rigorous and allowed us to make some preliminary comparisons with the normative data presented in the test manuals. In the case of the Movement ABC, these norms are based on the performance of 1234 American children. In the case of the KTK, norms are based on the performance of 1228 German children. Since very detailed item by item

Unlinked References

Barnett et al., in pressSmits-Engelmans and Lisse, in press

References (11)

  • American Psychological Association, 1987. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed., Washington,...
  • American Psychological Association, 1994. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., Washington,...
  • Barnett, A.L., Henderson, S.E., in press. An annotated bibliography of published studies employing the TOMI/Movement...
  • I.C Gillberg et al.

    Children with preschool minor neurodevelopmental disorders IV: Behaviour and school achievement at age 13

    Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology

    (1989)
  • L Hellgren et al.

    Children with deficits in attention, motor control, and perception (DAMP) almost grown up: Psychiatric and personality disorders at age 16 years

    Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

    (1994)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (0)

View full text