The relationship between gross motor skills and academic achievement in children with learning disabilities.
Kids with learning disabilities move less skillfully, and the worse the movement, the bigger the academic lag.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Westendorp et al. (2011) compared kids with learning disabilities to same-age peers. They looked at how well each child ran, jumped, threw, and caught. Then they checked reading and math scores.
The team used a quasi-experimental design. That means they grouped kids by diagnosis, not random assignment. All children were in late elementary grades.
What they found
Kids with learning disabilities scored lower on every gross motor skill. The bigger the reading or math gap, the worse the motor score.
No skill was spared: running, jumping, throwing, and catching all lagged.
How this fits with other research
Kisjes et al. (2025) backs this up. Their 2025 review shows motor and language problems often travel together. The review includes older studies like this one, so the motor-academic link is not new.
Pan et al. (2009) found the same pattern in kids with autism and ADHD. All groups had weaker motor skills than peers. Together these papers say: across many diagnoses, poor motor skills and poor classroom skills show up together.
De Weerdt et al. (2013) looked at the same learning-disability group but tested impulse control, not motor skills. They found that only reading-disabled kids had trouble stopping on Go/No-Go tasks. This sharpens the picture: motor delays hit the whole LD group, yet impulse problems hit just the reading subset.
Why it matters
If you write a plan for a child with LD, add a quick motor screen. Low scores can flag wider learning risk. Pair academic drills with simple movement goals like catching a beanbag while naming math facts. Small doses of both may boost the whole skill set.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present study compared the gross motor skills of 7- to 12-year-old children with learning disabilities (n = 104) with those of age-matched typically developing children (n = 104) using the Test of Gross Motor Development-2. Additionally, the specific relationships between subsets of gross motor skills and academic performance in reading, spelling, and mathematics were examined in children with learning disabilities. As expected, the children with learning disabilities scored poorer on both the locomotor and object-control subtests than their typically developing peers. Furthermore, in children with learning disabilities a specific relationship was observed between reading and locomotor skills and a trend was found for a relationship between mathematics and object-control skills: the larger children's learning lag, the poorer their motor skill scores. This study stresses the importance of specific interventions facilitating both motor and academic abilities.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.05.032