“Psychometric properties of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC-2): an analysis based on the Item Response Theory”
Nazario PF, Ferreira L, Caruzzo NM, dos Santos VAP, Vieira JLL. Psychometric properties of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC-2): an analysis based on the Item Response Theory. J Hum Growth Dev. 2022; 32(1):136-144DOI:10.36311/jhgd.v32.11041
Purpose: Development coordination disorder (DCD) has a prevalence of 6% in school-aged children according to the American psychiatric association. Another 15% of school-aged children are at risk for developing DCD. In Brazil, this puts more than 1 million children at risk for this disorder and having a valid and reliable diagnostic method is necessary for an accurate diagnosis. The Movement Assessment Battery for Children – second edition (MABC-2) is a comprehensive measure of motor skills and the most commonly used measure to identify children with DCD. Due to cultural and environmental differences, the present study looked to determine the discriminatory capacity of the MABC-2 motor tasks in Brazilian children.
Methods: This study included 582 children ( boys = 304, girls = 278) ranging from 3-5 years old. Prior to administering the MABC-2, the researchers were trained 2x per week for 30 days leading up to data collection. Nazario et al. verified the intra and inter-rater reliability using 95% ICC and demonstrated significant intra or inter-raters (0.75<0.90; P<0.001). The Item Response Theory (IRT) paradigm was used to determine how well the motor task captures what it is looking for.
Intervention: The MBAC-2 was administered by the researchers at an assessment site and each child was assessed individually. Each assessment took about 20 minutes.
Results: A total of 516 children were included in the analysis of internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha). The discrimination of items ranged from 3.82 to -0.08, indicating the latter motor tasks had less discrimination power than previously stated in the literature (24). Given the low discriminative capacity of some of the motor tasks in the MABC-2, it should be cautioned that the general classification of the child’s general motor performance may not be correct.
Conclusion: There were several MABC-2 items that did not perform as expected in the originally proposed model and children with higher motor skills will perform better on the MABC-2. This leaves room for a potentially negative impact of misdiagnosing children with DCD using the MBAC-2. There needs to be further review of the validity of the MBAC-2 for use in the assessment of children from different populations. Furthermore, the Item Response Theory revealed each motor task had its own level of difficulty and discriminatory ability.
Assessment of Strength and Weaknesses: A strength of this study was exploring and putting objective values to the validity of the MBAC-2 across different cultures and regions of the world, and the implications that may have. It is important to recognize that environment, and skills practiced growing up will vary based on location on this earth, and that that can affect a child’s performance on a given motor task included in the MBAC-2. I think the study could be strengthened by including a larger range of ages. The MBAC-2 is validated to be used in those who are 3-16 years old. The present study only included those 3-5 years old which may have contributed to their discriminatory values.
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This is a very interesting article with regard to using measures on children. I think the point you made about how important it is to consider the environment and skills being performed with regard to the child’s performance. This study showed how different backgrounds and cultures can contribute to performance on a standardized measure and that this needs to be considered when administering these.