Examining the relationship between motor assessments and handwriting consistency in children with and without probable developmental coordination disorder.
Use the MABC to catch timing issues in handwriting that set kids with DCD apart.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bo et al. (2014) watched kids write and gave them the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC).
They compared children with probable developmental coordination disorder (DCD) to kids without it.
What they found
Kids with DCD had shaky timing when they wrote, but letter size looked the same as peers.
Lower MABC scores matched the timing problems, not the size problems.
How this fits with other research
Whitehouse et al. (2014) saw the same timing trouble the same year. They counted long pauses longer than 10 seconds and pauses inside words. Both labs show DCD handwriting stalls in time, not space.
Kwok et al. (2019) push the clock back. They prove MABC-2 scores at age 3 predict DCD at 4.5 years in very pre-term toddlers. Jin’s study shows the test still matters in late elementary grades.
Vos et al. (2013) looked at autism, not DCD. Those kids made bigger letters, not timed ones. Different diagnosis, different handwriting signature.
Why it matters
When a child’s letters look neat but writing takes forever, run the MABC and watch the timing section, not the spatial score. Target interventions that build automaticity, like timed copying drills or metronome pacing, instead of tracing bigger lines. Share the timing data with teachers so they give extra time based on motor evidence, not just subjective slow-pencil claims.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) often experience difficulties in handwriting. The current study examined the relationships between three motor assessments and the spatial and temporal consistency of handwriting. Twelve children with probable DCD and 29 children from 7 to 12 years who were typically developing wrote the lowercase letters "e" and "l" in cursive and printed forms repetitively on a digitizing tablet. Three behavioral assessments, including the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration (VMI), the Minnesota Handwriting Assessment (MHA) and the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC), were administered. Children with probable DCD had low scores on the VMI, MABC and MHA and showed high temporal, not spatial, variability in the letter-writing task. Their MABC scores related to temporal consistency in all handwriting conditions, and the Legibility scores in their MHA correlated with temporal consistency in cursive "e" and printed "l". It appears that children with probable DCD have prominent difficulties on the temporal aspect of handwriting. While the MHA is a good product-oriented assessment for measuring handwriting deficits, the MABC shows promise as a good assessment for capturing the temporal process of handwriting in children with DCD.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.04.027