Cognitive strategy generation in children with developmental coordination disorder.
BACKGROUND
Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a condition of impaired quality of movement and occupational performance. It has been hypothesized that the difficulties experienced by children with DCD may in part be due to an impaired ability to use cognitive strategies to solve occupational performance problems. Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) is a verbally-based approach to helping children remediate this difficulty. The current pilot study investigated the use of cognitive strategies in children with DCD to determine whether cognitive strategy use is improved by CO-OP.


METHODS
Observations of video-recorded sessions of 18 school-aged children were scored for frequency and type of cognitive strategies used.


RESULTS
Differences within and between groups revealed changes in the types and frequency of cognitive strategies.


CONCLUSIONS
The results of the present study support the use of a cognitively-based approach such as CO-OP in assisting children with DCD in developing cognitive strategies when solving occupational performance problems. However, further research using a larger sample is necessary to fully explore the impact of CO-OP on the strategy use of children with DCD.
Sangster
Claire A
CA
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK. cas76@cam.ac.uk
Beninger
Claire
C
Polatajko
Helene J
HJ
Mandich
Angela
A
D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D015928:Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019957:Motor Skills Disorders / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D009788:Occupational Therapy; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D016896:Treatment Outcome; D014741:Video Recording