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The relationship between the long and short forms of the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency was investigated. Forty-eight regular education students, who had been referred to adapted physical education, were administered the long form of this test. Short form scores were subsequently derived from the long form items. Pearson product-moment r values generally indicated strong relationships between long and short form scores when the data were converted to standard and percentile scores. T-test analyses, however, indicated that long and short form standard score mean differences were significant at the .01 level (conventional .05 alpha level was reduced to .01 by the Dunn Test) for the two younger age groups and the all-subjects group. These results indicate that placement decisions in adapted physical education may vary depending upon which form of the test is used.

This study was designed to examine Ihe developmental differences in the speed and smoothness of arm movement during overarm throwing. The second purpose of this investigation was to evaluate whether jerk is a useful measure in understanding children's overarm throwing. Fifty-one girls, aged 3 to 6 years, voluntarily participated in the study. Each subject threw tennis balls as hard as she could toward a large target on the wall. A 2-camera video system was used to obtain 3-D coordinates of the hand and ball using the DLT algorithm. The variables of velocity and jerk (for the hand and ball) served as the movement outcome measures. The age-associated differences in velocity and normalized jerk (absolute jerk standardized relative to movement time and distance) were examined by ANOVAs. The results supported the hypothesis that the older subjects demonstrated faster and smoother hand movements than their younger counterparts during the forward acceleration phase (from the beginning of forward motion to ball release). In addition, the correlation results indicated thai increased hand movement speed was associated with decreased movement jerk in older subjects, whereas increased hand speed was associated with increased jerk in younger subjects. The findings suggest that examining the jerk parameter (normalized or absolute jerk) is a useful and alternative approach to capture the variance of hand movement execution for children's overarm throwing.