Rater reliability of the adapted scoring criteria of the Minnesota Handwriting Assessment for children with cerebral palsy.
OBJECTIVE
Current handwriting assessment tools are standardised mostly on typically developing students. This study estimated the intrarater and interrater reliabilities of the adapted scoring criteria, titled the Minnesota Handwriting Assessment-Cerebral Palsy (MHA-CP), for evaluating the effectiveness of handwriting interventions for children with cerebral palsy.


METHODS
We scored two batches of 20 random samples each from 80 handwriting samples produced by 30 children with cerebral palsy using the MHA-CP to estimate the intrarater and interrater reliabilities, respectively.


RESULTS
Intraclass correlation coefficients exceeded 0.95 for both intrarater and interrater reliabilities for all quality subscales of the MHA-CP.


CONCLUSIONS
The MHA-CP is shown to be a reliable measure of the manuscript handwriting performance of children with cerebral palsy who are in Grades 1 and 2. Further empirical testing is recommended to confirm its validity as an outcome measure for this population.
Tam
Cynthia
C
Bloorview Kids Rehab, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ctam@bloorview.ca
Ryan
Stephen E
SE
Rigby
Patty
P
Sophianopoulos
Mary-Beth
MB
D002547:Cerebral Palsy / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000628:therapy; D002648:Child; D004185:Disability Evaluation; D005260:Female; D006236:Handwriting; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D009788:Occupational Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results