Abstract
Children spend a large proportion of their school day engaged in tasks that require manual dexterity. If children experience difficulties with their manual dexterity skills it can have a consequential effect on their academic achievement. The first aim of this paper was to explore whether an online interactive typing intervention could improve children’s scores on a standardised measure of manual dexterity. The second aim was to implement a serial reaction time tapping task as an index of children's finger movement learning, and to see whether performance on this task would improve after the intervention. Seventy-eight typically developing children aged between 8 and 10 were tested at their school on the pre-intervention Movement Assessment Battery for Children (2nd edition; MABC-2) and tapping tasks. Twenty-eight of these children volunteered to be randomly allocated to the intervention or control group. Children in the intervention group had a choice of two online games to play at home over a period of four weeks, while the children in the control group were not given these games to play. The intervention and control groups were then re-tested on the MABC-2 manual dexterity and the tapping task. Children in the intervention group significantly improved their manual dexterity scores in the MABC-2 compared to the control group. On average, all children learnt the tapping sequence, however, there were no group differences and no effect of the intervention on the tapping task. These results have important implications for implementing a freely available, easy to administer, fun and interactive intervention to help children improve their manual dexterity skills.
Highlights
Activities for children require a variety of motor skills, which are developed and refined through practice (Ungerleider, Doyon, & Karni, 2002)
To characterise learning in the two conditions, a linear model was applied to each participant's data, estimating the steepness of the slope of reaction time (RT) as a function of repetition number
Learning slopes for the sequence condition were −9.59 ± 2.51 ms/repetition compared to the random condition, which was +1.14 ± 3.31 ms/repetition
Summary
Activities for children require a variety of motor skills, which are developed and refined through practice (Ungerleider, Doyon, & Karni, 2002). This includes balance, coordination, fine and gross motor skills. Fine manual skills are essential for children at a school-aged level, and problems with these skills can affect children in diverse ways (McHale & Cermak, 1992). The consequences of fine motor difficulties resulting in poor handwriting, or dysgraphia – with a prevalence in school-aged children ranging from 10 to 30% (Karlsdottir & Stefansson, 2002), include a tendency towards lower achievement in mathematics, lower verbal IQ, and increased attentional difficulties (Sandler et al, 1992). Due to the extent that impairments in fine motor skills can impact academic achievement in children, it is crucial that schools implement interventions for children with notable difficulties
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