Motor skill assessment of children: is there an association between performance-based, child-report, and parent-report measures of children's motor skills?

Client-centered practice requires therapists to actively seek the perspectives of children and families. Several assessment tools are available to facilitate this process. However, when evaluating motor skill performance, therapists typically concentrate on performance-based assessment. To improve understanding of the information provided by the different approaches, the study investigated correlations between performance-based, child-report, and parent-report measures of children's motor skill performance. A sample of convenience of 38 children 8-12 years of age with no history of motor or intellectual impairments and their parents was recruited from Victoria, Australia. Scores for the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency (performance-based, administered by a therapist), Physical Self-Description Questionnaire (child report), and Movement Assessment Battery for Children Checklist (parent report) were analyzed using Spearman's rho correlation. Several significant moderate-to-large correlations were found between scores for parent-report and scores for performance-based assessments, while few significant correlations were found between scores for child report and scores for the other two measures. The results suggest that children offer a unique perspective which should be integrated with other sources of information to gain a more holistic perspective of their motor skill performance.