Background: For children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD), the acquisition and performance of everyday visual-motor activities such as buttoning, shoe tying, cutting with scissors or writing, presents a major challenge. Regardless of the activity considered, children with DCD are typically slower and less accurate than their peers. Given the well-acknowledged difficulties of children with DCD, it is surprising to find very few research studies systematically exploring visual-motor skill acquisition and performance in children with DCD. Objective: The overall objective of this study was to systematically describe visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance in children with DCD. Methods: Twenty-four children (8 years 11 months to 12 years 11 months) were recruited for this study; 12 children with DCD, 12 children developing typically with regards to their motor skills. A computer-based aiming task completed with three different cursor controls of increasing levels of difficulty (mouse, joystick, novel controller) was designed for this study. Mixed-effect modelling and visual graph analyses were performed to describe the influence of motor ability and task difficulty on visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance. Results: Motor ability modulated the impact of task difficulty on visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance. Children with DCD were as fast and as accurate as their peers in their initial performance of the simple, well-learned task (mouse). However, they were slower and less accurate when performing the complex and novel visual-motor task. Over repeated trials, the visual-motor task performance of children with DCD improved on all tasks, even for the simple. With regard to the complex, novel task, once children with DCD understood the features of the task, their performance also improved and approached that of their peers. Conclusion: While children with DCD can generally be characterized as less accurate and slower than their peers, this characterization needs to be specified and qualified; it is probably best not applied to a well-learned task.

Background: For children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD), the acquisition and performance of everyday visual-motor activities such as buttoning, shoe tying, cutting with scissors or writing, presents a major challenge. Regardless of the activity considered, children with DCD are typically slower and less accurate than their peers. Given the well-acknowledged difficulties of children with DCD, it is surprising to find very few research studies systematically exploring visual-motor skill acquisition and performance in children with DCD. Objective: The overall objective of this study was to systematically describe visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance in children with DCD. Methods: Twenty-four children (8 years 11 months to 12 years 11 months) were recruited for this study; 12 children with DCD, 12 children developing typically with regards to their motor skills. A computer-based aiming task completed with three different cursor controls of increasing levels of difficulty (mouse, joystick, novel controller) was designed for this study. Mixed-effect modelling and visual graph analyses were performed to describe the influence of motor ability and task difficulty on visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance. Results: Motor ability modulated the impact of task difficulty on visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance. Children with DCD were as fast and as accurate as their peers in their initial performance of the simple, well-learned task (mouse). However, they were slower and less accurate when performing the complex and novel visual-motor task. Over repeated trials, the visual-motor task performance of children with DCD improved on all tasks, even for the simple. With regard to the complex, novel task, once children with DCD understood the features of the task, their performance also improved and approached that of their peers. Conclusion: While children with DCD can generally be characterized as less accurate and slower than their peers, this characterization needs to be specified and qualified; it is probably best not applied to a well-learned task.