In every classroom there are children with a whole variety of different physical abilities. Some children find co-ordination and sport a natural and easy skill to acquire, other children always seem to be bumping into things and find this skill much harder to master. Some of these children are just slower to develop than others but some have an underlying motor problem. Children with pronounced motor difficulties with no evidence of neurological, biochemical or physical abnormalities are termed as having Dyspraxia or developmental co-ordination disorder (DCD).

DCD has an incidence of about 5% and tends to co-occur with ADD, ADHD and in children with a very low birth weight. From a follow up study Losse et al (1991) found that DCD children still displayed substantial motor difficulties, as well as a variety of educational, social and emotional problems at sixteen years of age. DCD is therefore an ongoing problem for both children and adults.

DCD is often associated with motor learning/planning problems. These motor planning problems are sometimes related to difficulties in integrating information from the senses or to difficulties with the planning of motor sequences. More specifically children with DCD experience problems with planning, ordering and then carrying out a co-ordinated movement appropriate for their age. In addition, these children have problems with sensory integration and propioception.

Children with DCD have been shown to perform poorly at school. This is true as they find it hard to master fine-motor skills such as handwriting and computer skills. In addition these children show low self-esteem and judge their academic skills as less competent. Children with DCD have more behavioural problems than matched controls. These factors also contribute to the problems they show at school.

The most common assessment tool for diagnosing DCD is the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC; Henderson and Sugden 1992). This involves a range of tasks different for different age bands. Examples of some tasks are tracing, placing coins in a box, one leg balance, catching a ball, jumping in squares and walking with a ball balanced on a book.

So what is DCD?

A variety of studies indicate that children with DCD do not grow out of their co-ordination difficulties and such problems persist into adolescence and then onto adulthood. So far much of the research has shown that DCD children do not use visual information in the same way as a normal child would and this atypical utilisation of visual information causes the deficits in motor co-ordination.

DCD children experience problems with fundamental aspects of co-ordination such as visual pursuit and stable posture. Langaas, Mon-Williams and Wann looked at visual pursuit in DCD and normal children, ability of the children with DCD was impaired in this task.

Wann, Mon-William and Rushton looked at postural control using the swinging room paradigm. The swinging room provides visual information that you are moving but proproceptive information that you are still. Normal children rely mainly on the non-visual information to retain balance. The DCD children relied mainly on the visual information and so lost balance.

DCD children also have problems with fine motor tasks such as handwriting tasks. Wann (1987) looked at handwriting abilities of DCD and normal children. He found that children with DCD need the use of ongoing visual information, whereas their normal peers become less reliant on the continual visual information. Additionally DCD children have problems with catching balls and orienting themselves to the environment.