Timing abilities among children with developmental coordination disorders (DCD) in comparison to children with typical development.

Rosenblum et al. (2013) compared timing skills in two groups of elementary-age kids. One group had developmental coordination disorder (DCD). The other group had typical development.

Each child tapped along with an Interactive Metronome beat. They also copied a short sentence while a digitizer pen tracked every stroke. The team looked at how long kids paused the pen in mid-air between letters.

Kids with DCD tapped far behind the metronome clicks. Their average lag was large enough to spot without a stopwatch.

They also froze the pen in the air about twice as long as peers between strokes. A quick score that mixed tapping lag plus pause time correctly flagged 81 % of the children.

Bartov et al. (2024) used the same digitizer setup and again found big DCD deficits. They added grip-force data and showed that weak, shaky grip explains part of the slow, messy writing. The 2024 paper extends Sara’s timing work by telling us why the pen slows down.

Rosenblum et al. (2013) also published a sister paper the same year that used teacher ratings and legibility scores. Both studies landed on the same clear split between DCD and typical writers, so the timing result is not a one-off.

de Castro Ferracioli et al. (2014) looked at jump-and-clap timing variability in DCD and found the same story: these kids drift off the beat in gross motor tasks too. Together the papers show that poor timing shows up everywhere—fingers, feet, and pencil pauses.

If a child struggles to keep a beat or hovers the pen too long, you have a fast, cheap red flag for DCD. Run a 5-minute Interactive Metronome trial or count air-pauses with a stopwatch during writing. When both scores are high, refer for full motor testing and add timing drills to the skill plan.