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Article Excerpt
This study examined empirical evidence about the relationship between motor skills at the beginning of kindergarten and reading and mathematics achievement at the end of first grade, using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten cohort national dataset (N = 12,583). Results of hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that early kindergarten motor skills, especially visual motor skills, add a small but unique amount of variance to achievement in reading and mathematics at the end of first grade even after controlling for initial skills and demographic information. Furthermore, Receiver-Operating-Characteristic curve analyses showed that information from visual motor skills is useful in identifying children at risk for academic underachievement. The results suggest the importance of the role that motor skills can play in designing and implementing an early school achievement battery.
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The relationship between motor and cognitive skills has long been the subject of research in several fields. In child development, Piaget accorded sensorimotor skills a central role in children's early cognitive development. According to Piaget's (1952) developmental theory, motor skills contribute to infants' active exploration of the environment, and it is through such actions that infants construct their knowledge of the world. Related studies demonstrated that infants' experiences of self-produced locomotion (e.g., crawling) are related to such cognitive skills as object permanence and the organization of spatial information (Bai & Bertenthal, 1992; Bertenthal, Campos, & Kermoian, 19.94; Campos et al., 2000).
Advances in neuropsychology also provide information about the relationship between motor skills and cognition based on brain activity and structure. In one of the classic theories of neuropsychology, it was suggested that the same brain structure can participate in more than one functional system, the same functional system can draw upon multiple local structures distributed throughout the brain, and the functional systems can reorganize throughout development (Luria, 1973). Ellis (1985, 1987) applied a similar notion to literacy acquisition. He proposed a cognitive neuropsychological model for reading and writing acquisition in which reading and writing modules are not preformed in the infant brain waiting to be elicited by a certain kind of environmental stimulation at a particular time. Rather, the reading and writing systems are constructed from other cognitive capabilities, such as the visual, phonological, and semantic systems. Thus, developmental reading and writing disorders can be the consequence of disorders in other systems from which reading and writing skills emerge.
A related review reported that intellectual and perceptual-motor skills are acquired in fundamentally similar ways (Rosenbaum, Carlson, & Gilmore, 2001). According to this study, learning rates, training effects, and learning stages are highly similar for the two sets of skills. In addition, brain sites serving thought and perceptual-motor processes are not as distinct as once thought (Diamond, 2000). This may be explained by the theory that motor and cognitive systems develop dynamically by interacting with each other (Iverson & Thelen, 1999; Satz & Fletcher, 1988; Smith, Thelen, Titzer, & McLin, 1999).
Overall, the weight of the theoretical evidence provides a conceptual justification for examining motor skills in relationship to later cognitive achievement. The literature suggests that development of motor skills is associated with development of cognitive skills and motor skills can be an indicator of cognitive skills development.
Predictability of Early Motor Assessments
Predictability is often regarded as fundamental to early childhood measurement and is an important aspect of psychometric validity (Meisels, 1994). Validity represents an overall evaluative judgment of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy and appropriateness of conclusions drawn from some form of assessment (Messick, 1989). Predictive validity generally implies the degree to which an instrument of interest provides accurate measurement by comparing scores from the instrument with scores on a relevant criterion variable of later development (Bryant, 2000). For example, screening tests that purport to identify children at risk for future achievement problems should include appropriate indicators presumed to show a predictive relationship to skills not yet achieved. Information about predictability is thus an indispensable aspect of validity for early childhood assessment (Meisels & Atkins-Burnett, 2000).
Reports concerning the predictive validity of motor skills assessments for later cognitive achievement are mixed. In some studies, children's visual-perceptual or visual motor skills were among the best predictors of reading achievement in first through third grades (Tramontana, Hooper, & Selzer, 1988), with a mean correlation of .38 between visual-perceptual and reading achievement (Kavale, 1982). In other studies, some of which controlled for initial cognitive skills, correlations between motor and cognitive achievement were generally <.35 or sometimes statistically nonsignificant (Lesiak, 1984). Visual motor skills tend to have higher correlations with reading and mathematics achievement than do gross motor skills (Payne & Isaacs, 1999), although gross motor skills are also reported to have significant correlations (Knight & Rizzuto, 1993).
The tenuous long-term predictability of motor skills based on data obtained from measurements in early childhood is not, in fact, specific to motor assessment. One of the reasons for weak predictability is the instability of behaviors in young children. In addition to month-by-month changes, some conditions identified as delayed or at risk in young children may not be present as they grow older. For example, in the Kopp and McCall (1982) and McCall (1981) research, instability in individual differences during the first two years of life was demonstrated repeatedly in cognitive and motor test performance. In still another study of gross motor development, 31 of 800 children demonstrated poor gross motor skills at age three, but only 10 of the 31 children continued to exhibit poor motor skills at age five (Silvia & Ross, 1980). The remaining 21 children had caught up by age five. In other words, age-to-age stability in mental performance increases at about two years of age, increasing rapidly until approximately five years of age for normally developing children (Meisels with Atkins-Burnette, 1994). This suggests that measuring children's skills when they are kindergartners tends to have higher predictability for later achievement than testing when they are younger.
Whatever the stability of motor skills, the problem of prediction may lie as much with the analytic design of the investigation as with the phenomena being measured. A major methodological problem with these studies is the use of correlation coefficients as evidence of the tests' accuracy. Despite the fact that the bivariate correlations provide information on the similarity of the group's performance on tests of motor and cognitive skills, such studies provide no information about the predictability or specific identification of children at risk for cognitive underachievement. One of the most useful ways to evaluate a test's predictive accuracy is through an examination of individual classification decisions (Meisels, 1989). Another way is to use multivariate statistical methods that can examine predictability while controlling for such confounding variables as initial skills or demographics (Bryant, 2000). Multivariate methods also make possible examination of the combined as well as the independent effects of predictors, a strategy that is often used in investigations of motor skills (Broadhead & Church, 1988; Schmidt & Perino, 1985).
Using multivariate methods and individual classification decisions, the present study focuses on exploring the relationship between motor skills measured at kindergarten entry and cognitive achievement during early schooling. Early years of formal schooling is the period when children are instructed to develop basic academic skills in reading and mathematics, which provides foundations for later school achievement. Considering the importance of these basic skills and possible relations between them and motor skills, we chose to examine the predictive relationship from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of the first grade. Specifically, this study uses motoric items adapted from the Early Screening Inventory-Revised (ESI-R) (Meisels, Marsden, Wiske, & Henderson, 1997) administered in fall kindergarten to predict achievement at the end of first grade based on data from a national survey of early childhood learning. A study of the predictive relationship between motor scores in early kindergarten and cognitive achievement two schooling years later may shed light on the value of focusing on motoric skills at the outset of school as well as on the dynamic nature of child development among the...
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