The Role of Self-Regulatory and Metacognitive Competence in the Motor Performance Difficulties of Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder: A Theoretical and Empirical Review

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Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) experience difficulty coping with everyday demands due to difficulties in performing motor tasks. Recently, a cognitive learning paradigm has been applied to studying the nature of the problems experienced by children with DCD, which assumes that these children have fewer cognitive and metacognitive skills with which to acquire motor skills. However, despite the emergence of such cognitive models, individual differences in children’s use of self-regulatory and metacognitive skill during motor learning have received little research attention. The aim of this review article was to examine the roots of this emerging field of research, locate it within the larger body of metacognitive and self-regulation literature, and examine some of the preliminary work that has been conducted on the role of self-regulation and metacognition in motor learning and in the motor performance difficulties of children with DCD.