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Child & Youth Care Forum

, Volume 48, Issue 1, pp 19–28 | Cite as

How Well Can Family Childcare Providers Report on Preschoolers’ Motor Skill Competence?

  • Roger FigueroaEmail author
  • Lisa Barnett
  • Isaac Estevan
  • Angela R. Wiley
Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

Background

Assessing children’s movement skill competence objectively is resource and time intensive. Family childcare providers (FCCPs) are with young children for most of a normal weekday and may have an understanding of their motor skill competence.

Objective

This study examined how well FCCPs can report on preschoolers’ motor skills.

Method

Seventy-eight 3–5 year olds (53.1% girls) from 26 FCCPs participated. The Test of Gross Motor Development-2 assessed actual motor skill competence and a survey assessed preschoolers’ motor competence as reported by FCCPs. Bivariate correlations examined associations between actual and FCCPs’ proxy-report of preschoolers’ motor skill competence. Regression models tested the predictive power of FCCPs’ proxy-report on actual preschoolers’ motor skill competence, accounting for age and sex.

Results

There were moderate significant correlations for locomotion (r = .30), object control (r = .38), and overall motor skill competence (r = .36). The regression models showed proxy report was statistically associated with preschoolers’ object control skills (β = .78, p = .011) and overall motor skills (β = .72, p = .022), but not locomotor skills (β = .52, p = .084). FCCPs’ proxy-report of preschoolers’ motor skill competence explained 20.9, and 20.1% of preschoolers’ variance in object control, and overall motor skill competence, respectively after adjusting for biological sex and age (increasing).

Conclusions

FCCPs may be used as an alternative source of information in reporting young children’s actual motor skill competence, at least for the object control domain. There is an opportunity for education of FCCPs regarding children’s locomotor skill development.

Keywords

Motor skill competence Preschoolers Family childcare Perception 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the training grant “Illinois Transdisciplinary Obesity Prevention Program (I-TOPP)” funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), under Award No. 2011-67001-30101. The lead author is currently supported by the training Grant T32DK007703 from National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of interest

The author declares that they have no conflict of interest.

Human and Animal Rights

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public HealthBostonUSA
  2. 2.Deakin UniversityGeelongAustralia
  3. 3.AFIPS Research GroupUniversity of ValenciaValenciaSpain
  4. 4.Auburn UniversityAuburnUSA

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