The Development of Motor Skill in Childhood : on Ball-Handling Skill

Abstract

It is reasonable to assume that the motor ability of children is quite different in quality from that of youth and adult. That is, it is very rational that the children's motor ability should be assessed in terms of repertoire of their capable motor performance patterns. From this basic assumption, the skill development in ball-handling performances, which are very familiar with most of children, was investigated in this study. 275 kindergarten children were used as a sample. And 24 kinds of ball-handling performances, as a test battery, were administered to them in pass or fail form. In order to extract the ball-handling skills from the view point of linear model of motor ability, the principal factor analysis was applied to the correlation matrix which was computed with 24 items and, with all data pooled. Six principal factors were extracted and interpreted as follows; ball handling with hands, throw for accuracy with small ball, throw for accuracy, kick the rolling ball to aim, kick the placed ball to aim, and catching the flying ball. Then, the developmental tendency was studied in terms of these six skill areas of ball-handling performances. The ball-handling of passive nature, such as catching the rolling ball, bouncing ball and flying ball, showed a very definite tendency of development, but the ball-handling skills of active nature, such as throw for accuracy and kick the ball to aim, did not show any definite tendency of development in childhood. Then, testing the differences in the ball-handling skill scores of 24 kinds between the different age groups, many of their differences between 4 years of age and 5 in boys, and between 3 and 4 in girls were found significant statistically at 0.05 level, so it could be inferred that this type of motor skill, particularly ball-handling skills of passive nature, showed a definite tendency of development in these years of childhood.