Young girls may display greater object control skill (OC) deficits than similar aged boys (Goodway et al., 2010). Competence with OC skills is an important mechanism that may predict physical activity of young girls (Barnett et al., 2008; Stodden et al., 2008). Early motor skill intervention (MSI) provided by motor development (MD) experts shows that girls could significantly improve their OC skills and catch up to boys (Goodway et al., 2010). However, early childhood centers within the USA do not typically employ MD experts. As such, there is limited literature in regards to the capability of early childhood teachers to teach OC skills (Logan et al., 2011). Therefore, this study examined the influence of a MSI taught by preschool teachers on the OC skills of preschool girls.
Method:
Students were assigned to either a MSI (n=26: 13 girls) or a comparison group (n=31: 14 girls). The MSI group received 2, 30-minute intervention sessions per week for six weeks. The MSI was based on the Successful Kinesthetic Instruction for Preschoolers (SKIP) program (Goodway & Branta, 2003; Robinson & Goodway, 2009) and delivered by the classroom teacher. A MD expert provided 60 minutes of pre-intervention training to the teachers (N=2) as well as on-going coaching during the six-week SKIP intervention. Teacher’s coaching was based on the PE and classroom professional development literature (Patton & Parker, 2012; Shelton & Jones, 1996) and was faded across the six-weeks of SKIP delivery. All students’ were pretested and posttested on the OC subscale of the Test of Gross Motor Development-2 (Ulrich, 2000).
Analysis/Results:
A 2 Group X 2 Gender ANOVA on pretest OC standard scores yielded non-significant main effect for group (F[1,53]=2.12, p=.256). However, there was a significant interaction for gender as boys were significantly better than girls at the pretest (F[1,53]=.215, p=.048). In order to examine intervention effects a two-level Hierarchical Linear Model nesting students within teachers revealed significant predicted posttest OC scores for SKIP students (p<.001) with no significant differences for SKIP girls and boys (p=.714). A One-Way ANOVA examining between-group posttest OC measures was significant (F[1,53]=5160, p<.001).
Conclusions:
These findings demonstrate that preschool teachers can be coached to deliver an MSI called SKIP and bring about change in the OC skills of girls and boys. As such, girls catch up to boys in their OC skills. These results have implications for pre-service training of PE teachers, preschool teachers, and future policy.