Improvement of fine motor skills in children with visual impairment: an explorative study.
Six weeks of magnifier practice gives no extra fine-motor boost for preschoolers with visual impairment above regular play and writing.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Preschoolers with visual impairment joined a six-week magnifier program.
Kids practiced with a stand magnifier during play and writing tasks.
Twice a week for twelve short sessions they traced lines and copied shapes.
What they found
Both groups got a little faster and neater after six weeks.
The magnifier group did no better than kids who simply played and wrote without it.
Age alone seemed to drive the small gains.
How this fits with other research
Whitehouse et al. (2013) saw large gross-motor gaps in 8- to 14-year-olds with visual impairment.
That sounds like a clash, but the kids in M et al. were younger and worked on fine, not gross, skills.
Schott et al. (2021) adds that older children with visual impairment also struggle to picture body movements, so early fine-motor play may help before those imagery gaps grow.
Vinter et al. (2018) shows that practice still matters: 8- to 14-year-olds produced clearer drawings when they practiced more, backing the idea that steady fine-motor activity is useful even if magnifiers add little.
Why it matters
You can skip the stand magnifier and still support fine-motor growth.
Give preschoolers lots of tactile writing and drawing play instead.
Track their progress early, because bigger motor and body-image gaps show up later.
Use simple, cheap materials now while they are still eager to scribble.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In this study we analysed the potential spin-off of magnifier training on the fine-motor skills of visually impaired children. The fine-motor skills of 4- and 5-year-old visually impaired children were assessed using the manual skills test for children (6-12 years) with a visual impairment (ManuVis) and movement assessment for children (Movement ABC), before and after receiving a 12-sessions training within a 6-weeks period. The training was designed to practice the use of a stand magnifier, as part of a larger research project on low-vision aids. In this study, fifteen children trained with a magnifier; seven without. Sixteen children had nystagmus. In this group head orientation (ocular torticollis) was monitored. Results showed an age-related progress in children's fine-motor skills after the training, irrespective of magnifier condition: performance speed of the ManuVis items went from 333.4s to 273.6s on average. Accuracy in the writing tasks also increased. Finally, for the children with nystagmus, an increase of ocular torticollis was found. These results suggest a careful reconsideration of which intervention is most effective for enhancing perceptuomotor performance in visually impaired children: specific 'fine-motor' training or 'non-specific' visual-attention training with a magnifier.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.03.023