Assessment of Cognitive Abilities in Preschool Children with and without Developmental Coordination Disorder

Abstract

Differences in cognitive abilities between 54 Greek children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and 54 children without DCD, 5-and 6-yearold, were evaluated on the three subscales of the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS: Naglieri & Das, 1997a). Children with DCD performed significantly lower than the control group on the Planning, Attention and Simultaneous Processing Scales of the standardized CAS. In discriminative function analysis the tasks of the “Planning scale” and the “Figure Memory task” of the Simultaneous scale were the best discriminators between the two groups. The data were analysed using SPSS 19.0 for Windows (Norusis, 2011). In the current study, the cognitive performance of students with DCD was inferior to the control group in all cognitive tasks. The results suggest that children with DCD with significant difficulties in planning, spatial organization and memory mechanisms may probably be at risk for academic failure in the future. Early detection of cognitive-motor difficulties may be essential for early intervention.