How do the motor efficiency and visuo-spatial skills of primary school children relate to their teachers' evaluation of visuo-spatial skills?

Abstract

This study mainly intended to examine whether the objective motor and visuospatial measures assessed in school-aged children predicted the evaluations expressed by their teachers. Moreover, it was investigated whether the pupils identified by their teachers as those with the poorest visuospatial skills also exhibited the worst performance in an instrumentally administered functional mobility task using wearable inertial sensors. Non-verbal fluid reasoning, visuospatial fluency, spatial understanding, and mobility (i.e., the instrumented Timed Up and Go test, iTUG) were assessed in 116 children (M_age = 105.4 months, SD = 16.4 months) attending several Italian primary schools, whereas their teachers completed the visuospatial subtest of the Shortened Visuospatial questionnaire for teachers (i.e., SVS-vs). Statistically significant associations were found between the SVS-vs score, certain psychological measures, and the time required to perform the intermediate and final 180° turn in the iTUG task. Then, approximately 30 % of the variance in the SVS-vs condition was predicted by non-verbal reasoning, spatial understanding, and the time required to perform the final 180° turn in the iTUG task. Finally, children who reported the lowest SVS-vs scores were slower in performing the 180° intermediate turn of the iTUG test than the group who exhibited the highest SVS-vs scores.