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This study examines the psychometric properties of the Test of Gross Motor Development-2 (TGMD-2) in children with visual impairments (VI). Seventy-five children aged between 6 and 12 years with VI completed the TGMD-2 and the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (Movement ABC). The internal consistency of the TGMD-2 was found to be high (alpha = 0.71−0.72) and the interrater, intrarater, and test-retest reliability acceptable (ICCs ranging from 0.82 to 0.95). The results of the factor analysis supported internal test structure and significant age and sex effects were observed. Finally, the scores on the object control subtest of the TGMD-2 and the ball skills subtest of the Movement ABC correlated moderately to high (r = 0.45 to r = 0.80). Based on the current results, it is concluded that the TGMD-2 is an appropriate tool to assess the gross motor skills of primary-school-age children with VI.

The development of the ability to adapt one’s motor performance to the constraints of a movement task was examined in a longitudinal study involving 7 to-9-year-old children who were asked to perform a preparatory handwriting task. The capacity for sensorimotor synchronization was captured by the standard deviation of the relative phase between pacing signals and writing movements and the capacity to adjust wrist-finger coordination while performing repetitive movements was analyzed by autocorrelations of the vertical pen-tip displacements. While the capacity for synchronization improved with age, the autocorrelations were positive at short time lags only and hardly changed with age. A measure of “the long-term memory” of time series (Hurst exponent) confirmed that the findings were systematic rather than noise. Collectively, the results indicate that flexible movement strategies emerge early on in the first 3 years of formal handwriting education. Implications for educational and clinical practice are considered.

This longitudinal study examined the movement efficiency of typically developing children between 7 and 9 years of age by scrutinizing their movement amplitudes and frequencies as they settled into a loop-writing task in which both parameters were prescribed. It was hypothesized that during the first three grades at primary school children would show increasing efficiency in exploiting the inverse relationship between movement amplitude and frequency when adjusting their movement errors. Whereas a clear developmental trend showed increasing efficiency with respect to the way in which the primary school children met the amplitude constraints, a more variable pattern was found for the age-dependent adjustments to the frequency requirements. At the level of parameter-error corrections from one cycle to the next, a marginal developmental trend was observed. Results are discussed in terms of contrasting effects between educational targets and movement-efficiency principles.