Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Research Article

Motor Proficiency of the Head Start and Typically Developing Children on MABC-2

Department of Health and Human Performance, Texas State University, USA

*Corresponding Author:

Ting Liu
Department of Health and Human Performance
Texas State University, USA
Tel: 512-245-8259
Fax: 512-245-8678
E-mail: tingliu@txstate.edu

Received Date: March 05, 2015; Accepted Date: March 30, 2015; Published Date: April 03, 2015

Citation: Liu T, Hamilton M, Smith S (2015) Motor Proficiency of the Head Start and Typically Developing Children on MABC-2. J Child Adolesc Behav 3: 198. doi:10.4172/2375-4494.1000198

Copyright: © 2015 Liu T et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Objective: To investigate both fine and gross motor proficiency in preschool children enrolled in Head Start in comparison to their age-matched typically developing peers. Methods: Thirty-seven children from a local Head Start program and 37 typically developing children participated in this study. Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-2) was used to assess children's fine and gross motor performance in manual dexterity, aiming and catching, balance, and the child's overall motor performance. A one-way MANOVA was used to analyze the group differences on MABC-2 percentile scores for each subtest and the overall performance with the alpha level set at p <. 05. Results: The results revealed that the Head Start children performed significantly poorly than their age-matched typically developing children on balance, F (1,72)= 26.032, p<.01, and the total percentile score, F(1,72)=10.455, p<. 01. Conclusions and implication: It is suggested that future educators should design interventions with broader subset of skills to maximize motor proficiency for the economically disadvantaged preschool children to prevent long-term negative consequences associated with motor delays.

Keywords