The mother of a child with cerebral palsy recounts her daughter's efforts to walk after surgery. (CL)

Suggested is a sequence of 11 class activities, progressing from gross to fine motor skills, to assist the development of skills required to perform handwriting tasks successfully, for use particularly with children who lack fine motor control and eye-hand coordination. (KW)

A dance for early learners is given, as well as the music and with directions for making costumes. (DB)

Twenty-eight Down's syndrome and 33 normal children (4 to 17 years old) were evaluated for patellar tendon reflex, muscle tone, and grip strength. Results indicated that Down's syndrome children had a less brisk and more irregular patellar reflex response than normal controls. (Author/SB)

Found that infants who were delivered with their head turned right exhibited a neonatal right supine head orientation and a right-hand preference in visually guided reaching tasks at 19 weeks of age. Contrary to prediction, infants delivered with their head turned left did not exhibit a left-sided preference in either neonatal head position or…

The authors postulate that dysfunctions in the cortical sensorimotor areas of the brain that control internal speech may adversely affect the learning of reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic, especially in children who are first learning these skills. (Author)

The present study suggests that post-KR delay interval time or activity in the interval has little to do with learning on a self-paced positioning task, not ruling out that on ballistic tasks or more complex nonballistic tasks that a learner could make use of additional time or strategy. (MB)

Studied hand-mouth coordination in 40 infants of 1-3 days. Sucrose solution was delivered intraorally every 2 minutes. Results provide evidence for sucrose as a calming agent and for a coordinative behavorial system that integrates hand-mouth activity in supine human infants. (RJC)

Cyclical fluctuation in spontaneous motor activity (CM) emerges in fetus and persists in newborn. This "resetting" experiment perturbed CM by noise stimulus during infants' active sleep. Pre- and postperturbation CM were measured and compared. Subjects were 33 infants between 1 and 3 days of age. The stimulus induced a relative slowing of CM…

This study examined the accuracy and stability of oral motor control in 20 adults and 20 children. Although the children were less accurate and less stable, adults and children exhibited similar variability in their generalized motor program. Results are discussed within the framework of a schema model of motor control, especially the strategic…

Reduction in performance variability is characteristic of skill acquisition during childhood. Less understood is the role of variability in adaptive skill. The purpose of this study was to determine children's capacity for adapting to changing task requirements. Children ages 4-14 years and adults rode a stationary ergometer at different levels of…

Research focused on human motor development, learning, and control has been a prominent feature in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (RQES) since it was first published in 1930. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the papers in the RQES that demonstrate the journal's contributions to the study of motor development,…

What value is there in effective practice regimes if these same regimes do not, in themselves, engage the learner to continue to practice? This question was discussed in the context of two practice schedules that have been shown to be effective in studies of motor learning. But recent evidence has found these practice schedules to be either…