RECTOR & VISITORS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

This application addresses Broad Challenge Area (12) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education and specific challenge area 12-OD-101, Efficacy of educational approaches toward promoting STEM competencies. The title of the proposal is Improving Fine Motor Skill Development to Promote Mathematical Ability. Historically, motor and cognitive development have been considered as relatively independently developing skills, but recent evidence suggests that they are inextricably intertwined. Recent neuroscience and empirical research suggests that lagging fine motor skills in kindergarten and first grade may impact cognitive skills, especially math skills, at 3rd and 5th grade. The empirical evidence using several longitudinal surveys with data starting near birth and continuing through at least 3rd grade suggests that fine motor skills is as strong a predictor of later achievement as measures of attention (executive function skills), and that fine motor skills predicts math better than reading. The neuroscience evidence suggests that substantial cognitive capacity and neural infrastructure for learning is built during motor development that may be later used for cognitive development. Deficits is this "neural learning infrastructure" during motor development may subsequently impact the timing and skills learned during later cognitive development. Black boys have the poorest fine motor skills of any racial/ethnic/gender group, followed by black girls, but all free-lunch and other children can have poor fine motor skills. While recent experimental evidence suggests that improving executive function skills may impact cognitive skills, virtually no experimental evidence exists specifically testing whether improving fine motor skills improves math achievement. The proposed research is to do an experimental evaluation of the costs and effects of two fine motor skill interventions. The first intervention is a widely used, commercially available intervention (CALLIROBICS) that combines increasingly complex fine motor exercises in workbooks with accompanying music. The second intervention is one designed and administered by occupational therapists that utilizes their diagnostic skills and professionally approved methods to improve fine motor skills. The interventions will be carried out in after school settings in six schools in groups of 6-8 children for approximately 45-60 minutes four days a week for three semesters. Approximately 300 1st graders will participate in the experiment even divided between the two interventions and a control group. The children will be selected based on a pre-screening evaluation of motor skills together with their free lunch status. Schools would be selected having disproportionately high free lunch and minority populations. The children would be tested in one-on one conditions by school psychologists on fine motor skills, executive functions skills and math skills at the beginning, mid-point and end of the project. Teachers will provide assessments of the child's social, behavioral and self-regulation skills at the beginning and end of the experiment. An important element of the project is the estimation of the costs of the interventions in experimental and scaled-up scenarios allowing comparisons of the two interventions using cost-effectiveness measures as well as similar comparisons for interventions to improve math achievement that also have cost and effects data. The project is evaluating a new avenue for improving math achievement and if successful, will have a scientific impact on the ways that the relationships between motor and cognitive skills are conceptualized in the developmental and neuroscience communities. The complete abstract for this award is available in http://projectreporter.nih.gov/

Clarification of Codes