Fine motor and visual motor skills as a component of school readiness

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Date
2017
Authors
Skelton, Heather
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Abstract
Understanding school readiness is of the utmost importance. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which fine motor/visual motor (FM/VM) skills are related to school readiness at a population level through: creating a FM/VM Index from Early Development Instrument (EDI) items; describing children with Vulnerable FM/VM skills; determining if Vulnerable FM/VM skills are related to readiness on other EDI constructs; and determining if the FM/VM Index provides information not provided by the EDI's Gross and Fine Motor (G&FM) Sub-Domain. A Delphi process and ROC curves identified an 11 questions FM/VM Index with a vulnerability cutoff of <80. Children with Vulnerable versus Not Vulnerable FM/VM skills were statistically different on a wide variety of child, environmental and health at birth variables. Logistic regressions for select EDI domains/sub-domains showed that better FM/VM skills decreased the odds of being Not Ready or Vulnerable on these domains/sub-domains. The addition of the FM/VM Index and G&FM Sub-Domain into these models provided a better model fit with the FM/VM Index models being generally preferable. Overall, this work suggests that FM/VM skills are an important skill set associated with school readiness and therefore need to be considered when evaluating school readiness.
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Keywords
Fine motor, Visual motor, School readiness, Early Development Instrument
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