Perceptual-motor contributors to the association between developmental coordination disorder and academic performance: North-West Child Health, Integrated with Learning and Development study
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Date
2018Author
De Waal, Elna
Pienaar, Anita E.
Coetzee, Dané
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Show full item recordAbstract
Background: Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) portray motor
coordination and perceptual difficulties which can hamper daily activity and academic task
execution.
Aim: This study examined the association between DCD and academic performance, and
explored which perceptual and motor coordination skills had the largest contribution to
academic performance.
Setting: Ten-year-old children (N = 221, 10.05 years + 0.41 standard deviation) who formed part
of the North-West Child Health, Integrated with Learning and Development (NW-CHILD)
longitudinal study in South Africa were randomly selected to participate.
Methods: Motor coordination, visual-motor integration and academic achievement were
assessed using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2, the Beery–Buktenica Developmental
Test of Visual-Motor Integration-4, and national and mid-year assesments respectively. Spearman
Rank order correlations and stepwise regression analyses were used to respectively determine
significant associations and unique contributors.
Results: All perceptual and coordination skills differed between children with and without
DCD, although only visual perception and manual dexterity showed overall correlations with
academic performance in children with DCD. Visual perception also correlated strongly with
maths (r = 0.26) and with the grade point average (r = 0.31) in children with and without DCD
(r = 0.33, r = 0.45). The highest contribution to the total variance (23.11%) in math performance
was explained by visual perception (22.04%), while visual perception contributed to 16.36% of
18.17% in the grade point average.
Conclusion: Children with DCD display significantly inferior visual-perceptual and
coordination skills of which visual perception and manual dexterity influence academic
performance (especially maths), negatively
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10394/32916https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/562/761
https://doi.org/10.4102/sajce.v8i2.562
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- Faculty of Health Sciences [2386]