Motor Performance of Healthy Children Compared to Children with Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Purpose: Children with developmental disabilities show motor deficits. Previous studies are based only on norm values without a real control group. The present study aims to fill this gap. Materials and methods: 276 children participated in the study. MOBAK 1-4 was conducted with one subsample and DMT 6-18 with the other. Raw or Z-scores of the individual test items and the overall percentile rank are evaluated. An ANOVA was calculated for group comparison. Results: There is a significant difference in percentile rank between healthy and disabled children and between athletes and non-athletes. For the individual test tasks, significant differences between the groups are found with few exceptions. Conclusions: The differences can be attributed to both developmental disability and club affiliation. Whether perhaps the concept of school (e.g., school in motion, sports school) can have an influence should be examined in further study, since over the school all children can be reached.