Formal assessment

  • A child's motor function can be assessed for very different clinical reasons:
    • Evaluative measures are used to assess the change in performance over time as a result of growth and development and / or an intervention.
    • Predictive measures are used to identify children who may exhibit delays or disorders of movement in the future or to predict the outcome of a delay or disorder of movement.
    • Discriminative measures distinguish between children who do and do not have a delay, disability, impairment, functional limitation, or atypical development.
  • Different types of assessments need to be used to reliably evaluate, discriminate and predict gross motor function.
  • Norm-referenced assessments: scores reflect the degree of concordance between individual's performance and age-referenced population.
    • Objective: to determine if a child performs like other children of the same age on that particular item / test. Example: AIMS, PDMS-2, growth curves
  • Criterion-referenced assessments: scores reflect the degree of concordance between performance and a desired behaviour.
    • Objective: to determine whether or not the child can perform the test-item as specified and provide a measure of 'skills mastery'. Examples: GMFM
  • Observational: degree to which a specific item is present or not. Example: pain scales, EMI
iDevice icon THE AIMS
  • The Alberta Infant Motor Scale (AIMS) is a 58-item norm-referenced, standardized, observational and performance-based measure to assess the gross motor development of infants from term age through independent walking.
  • What does this mean?
  • What would be the clinical application of the AIMS?
« Previous | Next »