Research Article: Effectiveness of Psychomotor Therapy among Children with Graphomotor Impairment with and without DCD-Diagnosis
Abstract:
In Switzerland, psychomotor therapy (PMT) is a standard treatment for children with graphomotor impairments, but scientific evidence of its effectiveness is rare. To investigate the effectiveness of PMT, we conducted a randomised field trial (RFT). The sample consisted of 121 first and second graders with graphomotor impairments, some of whom met the criteria of developmental coordination disorder, while the remaining suffered from developmental dysgraphia. The treatments lasted over 5 months. Handwriting fluency and consistency were measured five times on a digitising tablet. All participating children completed a self-concept interview, and a standardised fine motor performance test twice. Psychomotor therapy significantly improved the fine motor skills of the therapy group compared to those of the waiting group. However, there was no evidence that the treated children improved more than the waiting children in terms of their graphomotor skills such as frequency, automaticity, and consistency of forming letters. Finally, the children of the therapy group showed partial improvements in their handwriting self-concept, while those of the waiting group children remained stable. This short-term RFT demonstrated the effectiveness of PMT in terms of fine motor skills and some aspects of the handwriting self-concept but showed no effects on handwriting fluency and consistency.
Introduction:
Current scientific models conceptualise handwriting as a complex neuromotor skill, which involves both cognitive and motor processes that are at least partially executed synchronically in a parallel mode [1,2,3]. Furthermore, the interferences between central processes and ongoing movement executions revealed in recent studies demonstrate that handwriting functions in a cascading manner [4,5,6,7,8,9]. As soon as the child learns to write by hand, he or she has to acquire the allographs of the respective language,…
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