Transfer of motor and strategy learning in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD): A scoping review.
Teach the plan, not just the move—kids with DCD keep the rule even when the muscle task changes.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Laureen and her team read 58 papers about kids with Developmental Coordination Disorder.
They asked: can these kids move a new skill to a new place or toy?
They looked for two kinds of transfer: body transfer (same move, new task) and mind transfer (same plan, new move).
What they found
Kids with DCD can share a thinking plan across very different games.
But they almost never carry a new motor move to a brand-new setting.
In plain words: the mind trick travels, the muscle trick stays home.
How this fits with other research
Bleyenheuft et al. (2013) saw the same stuck pattern in hemiplegic CP: grip stays weak until you fix the hidden sense problem.
Cavézian et al. (2010) showed you can unlock that grip by pairing constraint and bimanual play—an update Laureen’s map did not yet include.
Mason et al. (2025) working with rats found transfer of left/right rules inside a stimulus class fades fast—echoing the fragile motor picture in kids.
So animal and human data now line up: without extra help, transfer is brittle.
Why it matters
When you write a motor goal for a child with DCD, add a side goal that teaches the plan out loud.
Say the steps, have the child say them back, then try the move with a new ball, new room, new song.
One minute of strategy talk can save weeks of re-teaching the same swing.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a developmental disorder that affects the learning and execution of motor skills. Little is known about their ability to transfer their learning, i.e. to adapt prior knowledge to new tasks (Hattie & Donoghue, 2016). This is an important issue in these children, both to better understand how they can adapt initial learning to new tasks, and to develop interventions that will enable them to transfer their knowledge into their daily lives. The aim of this scoping review is to assess the body and nature of the existing literature on transfer of learning in children with DCD. After a search in 4 databases, 58 publications meeting the inclusion criteria were included. Among the studies, 18 aimed at measuring transfer, other can be interpreted as measuring transfer of learning even if transfer is not explicitly mentioned by the authors. The results show that children with DCD seem to have difficulty transferring their motor learning when the transfer tasks are far from the trained tasks but seem able to transfer their learning when the transfer tasks remain close, however they can transfer cognitive strategies to more distant transfer tasks. Future research is needed to systematically assess different aspects of transfer, with the aim of proposing effective interventions for children with DCD.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2025 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2024.104908