With informed consent 430 students in Grades 2 through 6 from two elementary schools in a large, suburban-rural school district were pretested and post-tested on the Children's Attitudes Toward Handicapped Scale. Students, by grade, rotated among four to seven different locations within the school's gymnasium, each identified by a different disability. There was no control group. Repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to assess the effect of sex on pre- and postexperimental exposures on the attitudinal scores. A 2 x 5 (school x grade) analysis of variance assessed the main effects of school and grade on attitudinal scores. Significant effects were sex but not school or grade.

This investigation examined differences in motor skill development between Finnish children (12 boys, 8 girls) with mild intellectual disability and typically developing Finnish children between the ages of 7 and 11 years. Ulrich's Test of Gross Motor Development (TGMD) assessed the performances of 20 children with intellectual disability and an age- and sex-matched sample of 20 children without disabilities. Videotaped performances were assessed by the authors who were very familiar with the TGMD-2. The group with intellectual disability performed at a statistically significantly lower level on the Gross Motor Quotient, Locomotor, and Object Control subtests of TGMD-2, compared to the group without intellectual disability. The delay was equivalent to 3 to 4 years behind the Finnish normative group in gross motor development. In five out of 12 subtests, the group with intellectual disability achieved 0% mastery. Given low gross motor skills, children with intellectual disability require additional fundamental motor skill training in their active school or free time.

Accurate measures of muscular strength can yield insights about children's growth and development. The purpose of this study was to examine grip strength performances by boys and girls ages 5 to 19 years. A Jamar dynamometer was used to measure grip strength by 736 boys and girls ages 5 to 19 years. Multiple regression equations were applied to analyze the data. Overall, age-sex trends were similar to previous reports as boys and girls increased their performances across age levels. After age 12, boys' mean grip strength increased at a faster rate than girls'. However, participants in the present study performed better in the upper age ranges (13-19 yr.) than did boys and girls tested a generation ago. Potential associations between activity choices and grip strength are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to examine the contributions of age, sex, balance, and sport participation on development of throwing by children in Grades K-8. The subjects were 381 boys and 338 girls (ages 4-14) enrolled in a medium-sized school system in southeastern Maine. Each subject was individually assessed in throwing development and static and dynamic balance. In addition, all subjects completed a survey relative to their participation in school- or community-sponsored sports. To determine the independent effects of age, sex, static balance, dynamic balance, and sport participation within each grade, data were subjected to multiple regression analysis, which indicated that mature throwing development was influenced by sport participation and sex. Boys performed better at all grades.

Children and adolescents with intellectual disability (ID) exhibit a mixture of cognitive, motor, and psychosocial limitation. Identifying specific inadequacies in motor proficiency in youth with ID would improve therapeutic management to enhance functional capacity and health-related physical activity. The purpose of this study was to initiate descriptive data collection of gross motor skills of youth with ID and compare those skills with competency norms. The Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency (BOT-2) was used to measure 6 items for balance (BAL), 5 items for upper limb coordination (ULC), and 6 items for bilateral coordination (BLC) of 123 males (ages 8-18) with ID but without Down syndrome. The authors performed 2,840 assessments (10-32 for each item); 944, 985, and 913 for BAL, ULC, and BLC, respectively. Mean scores for all age groups for BAL, ULC, and BLC were consistently below BOT-2 criteria. Overall motor skills of males with ID are below the competence expected for children and adolescents without disabilities.