Have children’s manual dexterity skills changed in the past 40 years? A cross-sectional observational norm comparison study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Norms for children aged 6-19 years were developed in 1985 for the Box and Block Test (BBT) and updated in 2013 for 3-10-year-olds. Evidence suggests that past normative data may need to be updated due to changes in children's hand use over the past 40 years. PURPOSE: To compare children's performance on the BBT with existing 1985 normative data. STUDY DESIGN: Secondary analysis of a cross-sectional observational study to validate the Complete Minnesota Dexterity Test (CMDT) using the BBT. METHODS: All were healthy volunteers, aged 7 to 18 years, with no known physical, cognitive, or emotional conditions. Participants completed study procedures in a pediatric hospital. During data collection we noted low performance on the BBT and hypothesized a decline compared to the 1985 norms. Participants completed one trial of the BBT with each hand. We compared our sample to the normative sample using mean number of blocks placed in 60 seconds and standard error of the means using two-tailed, one sample t-tests. RESULTS: Of 816 children screened, 181 were eligible and consented to participate. A total of 98 females and 83 males participated. Each gender-by-age group-by-hand category ranged from 4-21 participants. In each group, means were statistically significantly lower than norms, indicated by nonoverlapping 95% confidence intervals and t-test results. The difference in blocks placed in 60 seconds ranged from 9.1 to 31.3 fewer blocks. DISCUSSION: This study suggests that children's manual dexterity has declined over the past 40 years. Clinicians should consider this when using the BBT to evaluate performance. This study lacked enough subjects to establish new normative data but suggests the 1985 norms need to be updated. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide evidence of a decline in manual dexterity among children on the BBT since 1985.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".