A research team led by Associate Professor Keisuke Komura of Meijo University has developed "SMC-Kids," a physical ability assessment tool for young children that can be administered quickly and easily.
It is known that motor skills in early childhood affect not only physical health but also cognitive and learning abilities, making it an important indicator that should be monitored regularly. However, conventional tools for assessing motor skills in young children require specialized knowledge and skills, special equipment, and a large space, making it difficult to implement in childcare settings.
Therefore, the research team developed the Simple Motor Competence-check for Kids (SMC-Kids), which can easily measure the motor skills of children aged 3 to 6 years old without special equipment or a large space. The SMC-Kids consists of two items: the 10m round trip run, in which participants run a total of 2m back and forth while carrying two paper balls placed 1m away, one at a time, and the paper ball throw, in which participants throw a paper ball made of five sheets of A40 paper wrapped in cloth tape. All that is needed is A10 paper, cloth tape, a tape measure, and a stopwatch, and the test is easy to carry out indoors and can be safely conducted in a space slightly larger than a badminton court.
The validity of SMC-Kids was verified by comparing it with the "Test of Gross Motor Development-3 (TGMD-3)," a representative existing motor ability assessment tool, and a moderate to high correlation was observed in mobility and manipulation abilities, confirming that SMC-Kids is a tool that can appropriately evaluate the motor development of young children. In addition, reliability verification confirmed very high reproducibility between different assessors and in repeated measurements by the same assessor, demonstrating that it is a reliable tool that can obtain stable measurement results.
SMC-Kids is expected to be used not only in childcare settings, but also at home and at local events, and is expected to become a useful tool for parents and caregivers to easily understand the motor development of young children.
Paper information:[Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport] Validity and reliability of the Simple Motor Competence-check for Kids (SMCKids)