Gesture production in school vs. clinical samples of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) and typically developing children.
Kids with DCD copy familiar gestures less accurately, and school-found cases differ from clinic ones, so check both source and modality.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Charikleia et al. (2011) watched kids copy familiar hand gestures like waving or giving a thumbs-up.
They compared children with Developmental Coordination Disorder to typically developing peers.
Some kids came from school referrals, others from clinics, letting the team see if source mattered.
What they found
Children with DCD made more errors on every familiar gesture.
The gap changed with gesture type and with how the child was found: school-identified cases looked different from clinic-referred ones.
How this fits with other research
Asonitou et al. (2012) saw the same motor gap in younger preschoolers, showing the problem starts early.
Krajenbrink et al. (2023) seems to disagree: older DCD kids kept up in dual-task speed, but their task was very different and the kids were older, so fatigue, not speed, was the real clue.
Keating et al. (2024) add that sensory issues, not motor scores, drive daily-life problems, reminding us to look beyond pure gesture scores.
Why it matters
When you test a child for DCD, ask where the referral came from and watch more than one gesture type. A quick wave in the hallway may miss kids found through schools. Pair your motor check with sensory and teacher questions to catch the full picture.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a quick familiar-gesture copy task to your intake and note if the child was teacher-referred or parent-referred.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Dyspraxia, a difficulty in executing an operationalised act, has been associated with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). However, issues relating to the area such as comparisons across modalities, comparisons of school vs. clinical populations, and developmental delay vs. pathology have not been addressed in the same, comprehensive study. In the current study, therefore, familiar gesture production in DCD was addressed in a comprehensive manner to follow-up outstanding issues from previous studies: The production of familiar gestures and praxis imagery in a school (n=26) vs. clinic sample (n=19) of children with DCD was examined in relation to typically developing age matched (n=24) all aged from 9 to 11 years, and two groups of younger children within the age ranges of 5-6 (n=23) and 4-5 (n=26) years. Overall, children with Developmental Coordination Disorder showed an impaired ability to produce familiar gestures compared to their typical peers, and this was dependant on the type of gesture and presentation modality. Differences were found between school and clinic samples of children with DCD, suggestive of the recruitment of different underlying mechanisms in the two samples. The results have a bearing on our understanding of the relationship of developmental dyspraxia to DCD, as well as of the issue of developmental delay vs. pathology.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.01.030