The relationship between motor skills and psychosocial factors in young children: A test of the elaborated environmental stress hypothesis

Abstract

The current results indicate the EESH may function differently across different periods of development. The transition from pre-primary to Grade 1 represents a time of important cognitive and psychosocial development, which has implications for how the relationship between motor skills and internalizing problems can be understood. These findings highlight potential age-appropriate targets for psychomotor interventions aiming to improve the emotional well-being of young children.

Movement difficulties in children with ADHD: Comparing the long‐ and short‐form Bruininks–Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency—Second Edition (BOT‐2)

“…r ≥ .80) between test versions (Bruininks & Bruininks, 2005). As such, the literature is populated with studies utilising the short-form to gain an overall indication of a population's motor proficiency (Lucas et al, 2013;Mancini, Rigoli, Roberts, Heritage, & Piek, 2017;McIntyre et al, 2017). However, a major limitation within these studies is that the validity of clinical or diagnostic interpretations are subject to scrutiny given accumulating evidence that the short-form classifies less children at-risk of movement difficulties compared to the long-form.…”

Poor Motor Performance – Do Peers Matter? Examining the Role of Peer Relations in the Context of the Environmental Stress Hypothesis

“…Empirical evidence of this indirect association is growing. For example, Mancini et al (2016Mancini et al ( , 2018a and Wagner et al (2012Wagner et al ( , 2016 found that peer problems mediated the association between motor skills and internalizing problems. Several studies (e.g., Pearsall-Jones et al, 2011) pointed out that the influence of environmental factors, such as negative peer interactions, play an important mediating role in the relationship between poor motor skills and internalizing problems (Piek et al, 2007(Piek et al, , 2010Cairney et al, 2010Cairney et al, , 2013.…”

Measure reliability of the Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance for Children Scale via Rasch analysis

“…Mantzicopoulos et al (2004) noted reliability concerns for the competence factor and postulated a potential ceiling effect (i.e., the items were not sufficiently difficult for kindergarten-aged children) that demanded further attention. Concordant with these findings, reliability concerns have been noted in several contemporary uses of the PSPCSA (e.g., Mancini, Rigoli, Roberts, Heritage, & Piek, 2017). Furthermore, the authors called for further examination of the potential for comprehension-based variations in the items of the PSPCSA that may bias participant scores on the measure, which were unfortunately not directly examined in their study.…”

“…Consequently, a Rasch measurement approach applied to the PSPCSA's Competence (i.e., the combination of the physical and cognitive competence items) and Acceptance (i.e., the combination of the peer and maternal acceptance items) measures separately provides a basis to investigate the discrepant patterns of construct validity and reliability patterns as previously outlined (e.g., Harter & Pike, 1984;Mancini et al, 2017). While Harter and Pike (1984) originally presented the PSPCSA as having four separate subscales, their analyses supported a two-factor (Acceptance and Competence) model.…”