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Improvement in children’s fine motor skills following a computerized typing intervention

McGlashan, Hannah L.; Blanchard, Caroline C.V.; Sycamore, Nicole J.; Lee, Rachel; French, Blandine; Holmes, Nicholas P.

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Authors

Hannah L. McGlashan

Caroline C.V. Blanchard

Nicole J. Sycamore

Rachel Lee

Blandine French

Nicholas P. Holmes



Abstract

Children spend a large proportion of their school day engaged in tasks that require manual dexterity. If children experience difficulties with their manual dexterity skills it can have a consequential effect on their academic achievement. The first aim of this paper was to explore whether an online interactive typing intervention could improve children’s scores on a standardised measure of manual dexterity. The second aim was to implement a serial reaction time tapping task as an index of children's finger movement learning, and to see whether performance on this task would improve after the intervention. Seventy-eight typically developing children aged between 8 and 10 were tested at their school on the pre-intervention Movement Assessment Battery for Children (2 nd edition; MABC-2) and tapping tasks. Twenty-eight of these children volunteered to be randomly allocated to the intervention or control group. Children in the intervention group had a choice of two online games to play at home over a period of four weeks, while the children in the control group were not given these games to play. The intervention and control groups were then re-tested on the MABC-2 manual dexterity and the tapping task. Children in the intervention group significantly improved their manual dexterity scores in the MABC-2 compared to the control group. On average, all children learnt the tapping sequence, however, there were no group differences and no effect of the intervention on the tapping task. These results have important implications for implementing a freely available, easy to administer, fun and interactive intervention to help children improve their manual dexterity skills.

Citation

McGlashan, H. L., Blanchard, C. C., Sycamore, N. J., Lee, R., French, B., & Holmes, N. P. (in press). Improvement in children’s fine motor skills following a computerized typing intervention. Human Movement Science, 56(B), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2017.10.013

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 19, 2017
Online Publication Date Oct 31, 2017
Deposit Date Oct 20, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Human Movement Science
Print ISSN 0167-9457
Electronic ISSN 1872-7646
Publisher Elsevier
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 56
Issue B
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2017.10.013
Keywords Movement, learning, intervention
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/890616
Publisher URL http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167945716302974
Related Public URLs https://osf.io/et4b2/
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/human-movement-science

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