Motor skill learning with impaired transfer by children with developmental coordination disorder.
Kids with DCD can master a tracing task as fast as peers, but the skill collapses when prompts vanish—so fade prompts early and probe real-world use every session.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked the preschoolers to trace a new letter on a tablet. Half had developmental coordination disorder (DCD).
Kids got dots to guide the first 20 trials. Then the dots vanished. Everyone practiced until they hit the same speed goal.
Researchers counted how fast each child learned and whether the new skill moved to the no-dot sheet.
What they found
Both groups reached the speed goal in about the same number of tries. Kids with DCD were not slower learners.
When the dots disappeared, the DCD group froze. Their lines fell apart. The skill did not transfer.
Typical peers kept smooth, accurate traces without dots. Same practice, very different end point.
How this fits with other research
Peng et al. (2026) pooled 24 exercise studies and saw big gains in motor skills for kids with DCD. Their review says these children can improve, but most training stayed in the same format. The new data add a warning: gains may not travel to new settings.
Izawa et al. (2012) looked at autistic children and found slow yet successful motor generalization. That seems opposite to the DCD failure here. The gap makes sense: autism brains lean hard on body-feel cues and finally adapt, while DCD brains struggle to build an inner model of the movement.
Noten et al. (2014) showed DCD children falter on hand-rotation imagery tasks. Both papers point to a weak internal model that blocks flexible use of newly learned moves.
Why it matters
For BCBAs, the message is simple: keep the practice world close to the real world. If you teach letter writing with prompts, fade them early and test on plain paper right away. Add short, prompt-free trials from day one. Check transfer every session, not at discharge.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: DSM-5 criteria for developmental coordination disorder (DCD) emphasize deficits in the acquisition and execution of coordinated motor skills. Previous studies of motor skill learning in DCD suggest deficits in the execution of motor skills but do not reveal a deficit in learning new skills, possibly because of the heterogeneity of motor deficits in DCD. AIM: In light of the high prevalence of handwriting difficulties among children with DCD, the current study compared motor skill learning in 5-6-year-old children with DCD and their peers using a grapho-motor learning task that resembles a letter-writing practice. METHODS: Thirty-two boys, 16 with DCD, learned to produce a new "letter" formed by connecting three dots. Training, following-day consolidation, 1-week post-training retention, and far-transfer to a no-dot condition were tested. RESULTS: Children with DCD exhibited rates of learning similar to those of their peers, but with overall poorer performance, replicating previous findings. Contrary to reports of intact skill transfer following a consolidation period in DCD, impaired transfer of the learned symbol was observed. CONCLUSIONS: These findings may explain some of the motor difficulties experienced by children with DCD as well as contribute to the discussion on mechanisms involved in skill learning in these children.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2020 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2020.103671