Book Review: Typical and Atypical Motor Development Clinics in Developmental Medicine ByDavidSugden and MichaelWadeLondon: Mac Keith Press, 2013 £145.00 (Hardback), pp 384. ISBN: 978‐1‐908316‐55‐4
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors of this book describe the markers or milestones of motor development (the ‘what’), but more importantly they discuss the process of developmental change (the ‘how’) by exploring the myriad factors that influence the journey from birth to maturity. The first six chapters provide an overview of typical development, including historical changes in descriptive approaches and developmental theories, the influence of biological parameters and brain development, and detailed descriptions of the motor stages from birth to 24 months, 2–7 years, and 7 years to puberty. The second half of the text addresses atypical development. Separate chapters on cerebral palsy, developmental coordination disorder, intellectual disability, visual impairment and other developmental disorders (dyslexia, autism, attention-deficit–hyperactivity disorder and specific language impairment) provide excellent summaries of the etiology, epidemiology, pathophysiology, classification, and specific motor characteristics of each condition. These chapters are excellent for readers searching for succinct, contemporary synopses of these diagnoses; they are valuable educational resources. The final chapter addresses assessment and intervention strategies, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between the two processes, each informing the other. Differing principles and frameworks of assessment and intervention approaches are described followed by specific examples of contemporary clinical and educational intervention approaches. Throughout the text the authors refer to their transactional model of development, which views solutions to motor skills or challenges as a product of the transactions among the characteristics of the child, the required motor task, and environmental influences. This contemporary view of development resonates not only with theoretical motor frameworks such as ecological task analysis, dynamic motor systems, and neuronal group selection, but also with the new perspective on disability espoused by the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health and the definition of disability used in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The model provides excellent scaffolding for the discussions of motor development, both typical and atypical, and for explaining the specific emphasis of different assessment and intervention approaches. The book is well laid out with excellent introductions and summary sections for most chapters. The ‘boxed’ descriptions in each chapter provide well-written abstracts of specific research studies that have contributed to the chapter topic; they provide the reader with glimpses of the types of research being done in different areas. The book is a delight to read. It provides in-depth descriptions both of typical and atypical motor behaviours. It explains the processes that influence the emergence and change of motor skills from birth to puberty by summarizing pertinent theoretical frameworks and research evidence. It is a valuable resource for clinicians, educators, students, and anyone interested in understanding the wonder of motor development from a contemporary perspective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.101 | 0.059 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".