Brief assessment of motor function: content validity and reliability of the oral motor scales

The Brief Assessment of Motor Function consists of five 0- to 10-point hierarchical scales designed for rapid assessment of gross, fine, and oral motor skills. We describe the development and evaluation of the two Brief Assessment of Motor Function Oral Motor Scales: Oral Motor Articulation and Oral Motor Deglutition.

This validation study employed an expert panel of 28 speech-language pathologists, who rated the Brief Assessment of Motor Function Oral Motor Scales items on a scale from 1 to 4 (disagree to agree) to establish content validity. For reliability, oral motor performances of 18 participants (6 mos-20 yrs) were videotaped to represent a wide range of articulation and deglutition capabilities. Four speech-language pathologists, and 1 undergraduate and 10 graduate speech-language pathology students rated the participants' taped samples using the Brief Assessment of Motor Function Oral Motor Scales.

All items on the content validity questionnaire had average agreement scores that exceeded criteria, except two, which were not clearly worded; these were clarified. Interrater and intrarater reliability values were 0.997 and 0.986 for the Oral Motor Articulation Scale and 0.977 and 0.997 for the Oral Motor Deglutition Scale.

Expert feedback and reliability procedures suggest that the Brief Assessment of Motor Function Oral Motor Articulation and Deglutition Scales represent the content that they are designed to assess and are reliable for rapid assessment of oral motor skills.