Development of the Checklist of Psychomotor Activities for 5- to 6-Year-Old Children

Abstract

The present research aimed to develop the Checklist of Psychomotor Activities (CPA) to measure psychomotor development in 5-6 year old children. We recruited 694 preschool children in the province of Albacete; their teachers were trained to use and complete this instrument to gather data for testing its psychometric properties (reliability, and content, construct, and discriminant validity). The CPA is composed of three subtests measuring children’s performance in motor, perceptual, and emotional–social aspects of psychomotor functioning. To gather evidence of content validity, we applied the Delphi method, based on the comments of seven judges. We assessed construct validity with confirmatory factor analysis, and we tested discriminant validity by comparing the scores of premature and typically developing children and separate groups of children defined by their body mass index. We found adequate item consistency on each scale and evidence of validity from the various methods outlined. We conclude that the CPA is an effective and comprehensive tool for the assessment of psychomotor skills in children at this important stage of development.

Psychomotor Limitations of Overweight and Obese Five-Year-Old Children: Influence of Body Mass Indices on Motor, Perceptual, and Social-Emotional Skills

“…The evaluation instrument was the Checklist of Psychomotor Activities (CPA) [38], which collects information on three factors of children’s psycho-motor development: motor, perceptual and social-emotional. The CPA is composed of 12 variables divided as follows: the physical-motor factor is evaluated by laterality items (LAT—seven tasks), dynamic coordination (DC—six tasks), balance (BAL—five tasks), motor execution (ME—three tasks) and tonic postural control (TPC—three tasks).…”

“…The social-emotional items were evaluated by the teacher, who scored the behavior and attitude of each child at the end of the academic term, using a Likert type scale (from 1–5, 5 being the highest score in all cases). The psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of the CPA may be consulted in Romero [38].…”

Physical, Perceptual, Socio-Relational and Affective Limitation of Five-Years-Old Children Born Preterm and Full-Term.

“…To determine the psychomotor development of children it was completed the Checklist of Psychomotor Activities (CPA). 6 The CPA evaluates the following scales and dimensions:…”

“…2 Several authors agree that the term psychomotricity implies motor development and this in turn, implies physical changes and interaction with the context, resulting in the evolution of other processes such as cognitive and affective ones. [3][4][5] This research evaluates the process of developing motor skills using an instrument proposed recently, the Checklist of Psychomotor Activities (CPA) 6 in early ages ( ve-years-old) by conducting a comparative study between children born preterm and full-term and their motor and emotional skills.…”

“…14 The data was gathered with the most appropriate information for the study by completing a checklist developed in a previous study with observations made by teachers. 6 These results highlight the importance of prevention and the establishment of referral, observation and follow-up protocols in preterm children by different areas such as medicine, education and psychology for the implementation of actions that favor children born prematurely, 15 avoiding certain motor dissociations that may appear in the early years of childhood, such as those evidenced in the performance of this study; the result of the observation shows de ciencies in both body image and body schema which cause poor motor development, objective and subjective management, aspects closely related to emotional development, being these, the sources of motor sensory integration and social representations; the low scores in the visual-motor association and coordination aspects still in development in each of the learning stages, are also mentioned. 16 Although many studies have assessed the motor development of premature children, only few have been conducted taking in consideration an older school age group such as the age of ve-years-old, age when the initial de ciencies appear in the acquisition of core subjects and social skills, once the motor, family, cognitive, sociorelational and affective characteristics are evaluated.…”