The Test of Gross Motor Development-2 Article Summary
All information found in the previous posts regarding the Test of Gross Motor Development – Second Edition (TGMD-2) and the development of the Test of Gross Motor Development – Third Edition (TGMD-3) remains accurate. The official publication of the TGMD-3 is expected to be released March 2019.
Colebourn JA, Golub-Victor AC, Paez A. Developing overhand throwing skills for a child with autism with a collaborative approach in school-based therapy. Pediatric physical therapy. 2017;29(3):262-269. doi:10.1097/PEP.0000000000000405
This study was a case study where the main focus was to devise an approach to improve the gross motor skills of a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder that included physical therapy and applied behavior analysis (ABA) in the intervention.
The case study followed a 9-year-old boy who was a third-grade student in a public elementary school. This young boy was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, decreased tone (hypotonia), receptive/expressive language disorder and sensory integration dysfunction.
The subject participated in a 24-week intervention program to enhance his gross motor skills (specifically overhand throwing). The intervention was delivered over 24 weeks with PT sessions and ABA sessions broken up into 3 phases. The PT sessions were 30 minutes each and the ABA sessions were 10 minutes each. Phase 1 was focused on motor planning. In this phase they worked on the mechanics needed to successfully throw the ball. the subject went through 3 PT sessions and 12 ABA sessions in phase 1. In addition to those sessions, he also went through a weekly adapted physical education class for about 30 minutes, but there was no relationship between the tasks performed there and those performed during PT. Phase 2 was focused on target practice after motor planning was mastered. He was to actually throw a ball at a target in this phase. The subject went through 10 PT sessions and 63 ABA sessions. Phase 3 was focused on participation and included a throwing game that included other people. They did this in order to help the subject with reciprocal playing and the language/social skills he would need to play with other kids during other activities.
The Test of Gross Motor Development-2 (TGMD-2), The Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency-2 (BOT-2), and the School Function Assessment (SFA) were the outcome measures used during this study.
They found that the subject demonstrated stability in motor learning and maintenance of skills learned across a 5-month time frame. Additionally, his throwing accuracy improved from 7% to 93%. They also found that on the TGMD-2 he progressed from poor to average.
I think the article did a good job describing the subject and explaining the intervention along with the specifics of each phase. A limitation of the study I think would be that they didn’t give much detail with the results. Specifically, on the outcome measures, such as the TGMD-2, which I’m exploring for this assignment. I felt like they just generally stated that the subject made improvements but didn’t really explain what specific areas he did poorly in and what areas he excelled in before/after the intervention that improved his overall scores on the TGMD-2.
Overall, the collaboration between physical therapy and applied behavior analysis was able to help the subject improve his ability to learn new motor skills. It also helped him to be more motivated to participate in activities in school by decreasing interfering behaviors and facilitating development of the language/social skills that he needs for those interactions with other students. The location and type of instruction, type of cues, including task analysis, discrete trials, and the combination of ABA and PT really improved the subject’s willingness to participate in the intervention. There has been some research on the effectiveness of the TGMD-2 and children with autism who may have limited language and communication abilities. Additionally, it might be a useful tool in the school setting but there is limited support for its actual reliability in this population of children with autism spectrum disorder.
2 responses to “The Test of Gross Motor Development-2 Article Summary”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Why do you think they focused on overhead throwing the most? Was his initial baseline very off from the norm? I know throwing accuracy is a skill acquired fairly young so I wonder if they looked at that for a specific reason?
That’s a great question Michelle. I know they were focused on improving his gross motor skills overall. At one point he expressed interest in galloping and the focus turned to that. Early on in the intervention he expressed interest in throwing so they moved the focus onto that. They kind of let his motivations guide the interventions. The TGMD-2 has a subset area that examines overhand throwing. They don’t provide details on his initial individual subset scores but apparently he did make great improvements in the TGMD-2 especially in throwing. I hope that answered your question.