Showing papers by "Trevor G. Bond published in 2009"

Measurement properties of fine motor scale of Peabody developmental motor scales-second edition: a Rasch analysis.

Abstract: Objective: To investigate the measurement properties (including rating scale performance, unidimensionality, and differential item functioning) of the fine motor scale of the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-Second Edition in children, by using the Rasch analysis. Design: A total of 419 children (including 342 typically developing children and 77 children with fine motor delays or difficulties) were recruited in Taiwan for this prospective study. Each child was evaluated with the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-Second Edition that consists of 26-item grasping and 72-item visual-motor integration subtests. Partial credit Rasch analysis was used for all analyses. Results: The Rasch analysis indicated that middle rating category for 19 grasping and 52 visual-motor integration items could be collapsed to allow only dichotomous response categories. Item fit analysis and principal component analysis suggested that the unidimensionality of the grasping and visual-motor integration subtests could be achieved after removal of two grasping and eight visual-motor integration misfitting items. All but 13 items in the composite scale could form a unidimensional construct of overall fine motor ability. Furthermore, only a few items were found to show differential item functioning across sex (ten items) or fine motor status (seven items). However, significant ceiling effects were found in the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-Second Edition subtests and composite scale when applied to these typically developing children. Conclusions: Our results suggest grounds for the revision of the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-Second Edition in a subsequent edition. Simplifying the rating scales and reducing the misfitting items in the subtests and composite scales might result in a unidimensional assessment of children’s fine motor ability. Clinicians and researchers could use the reduced Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-Second Edition as a criterion-referenced outcome measure to document changes; however, further work is needed to reduce the ceiling effects.

Piaget and method.

Abstract: Piaget's method of data collection has always appeared quite unorthodox to psychologists raised on the Anglophone diet of standardized, objective, and experimental scientific method where results were routinely presented following some sort of routine statistical analyses. Piaget's books revealed him as merely chatting to few children - mainly his own and apparently, just a few others - about the moon, about their drawings of bicycles, and most famously, how skinny glasses held more juice than fat ones did. Interesting for sure - but hardly replicable, scientific psychological experiments: The questions changed, the procedures changed, and none of the results showed means and standard deviations. Considering the number of published papers and books, we remain surprised by the small space Piaget gave to explaining his method. Although the hundreds of protocol extracts, meant to illustrate his theory, correspond to almost half of the pages of each published volume, the mention of any detailed data collection, setting, or precise method eventually used in the reported investigations is rare and generally very vague: "You place in front of the child a certain number of flowers _ .. "; " ... it is useful . .. to have the child draw a picture ... " (see Tryphon, 2004-). This lack of clarity has given rise to many criticisms of Genevan researchers' "bad habits," such as non rigorous experimental conditions, small, non representative samples, and lack of quantitative analyses (Flavell, I963).