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Increased Throwing Accuracy Improves Children's Catching Performance in a Ball-Catching Task from the Movement
Tim Dirksen1, Marc H E De Lussanet2, Karen Zentgraf3
1Department of Motion Science, Institute of Sport and Exercise Sciences Münster, Germany.
Insights
Throwing accuracy significantly impacts children's ball-catching performance and strategy in the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC-2). Accurate throwing allows children to reduce temporal precision demands, suggesting throwing skill should be considered in assessments.
Area of Science:
- Child motor development
- Movement science
- Biomechanical analysis
Background:
- The Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC-2) assesses motor skills in children.
- A key task involves catching a self-thrown ball, but its evaluation focuses solely on outcome, not the throwing component.
- The influence of throwing accuracy on catching performance and strategy is not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the effect of throwing accuracy on children's ball-catching performance.
- To determine how throwing accuracy influences the choice of catching strategy.
- To assess the role of throwing skills in MABC-2 ball-catching task evaluation.
Main Methods:
- Children performed a ball-catching task from the MABC-2.
- Catching performance was measured by the number of successful catches.
- Kinematic analysis quantified throwing accuracy, ball trajectory, and hand movements to analyze catching strategies.
Main Results:
- Increased throwing accuracy was significantly correlated with improved catching performance.
- Higher throwing accuracy correlated with a longer hand-on-ball contact time during the catch.
- This suggests accurate throwing reduces the need for precise timing in catching.
Conclusions:
- Throwing accuracy is a significant factor in MABC-2 ball-catching performance and strategy.
- Current MABC-2 evaluation, based only on outcome, may overlook crucial throwing skill contributions.
- Future assessments should incorporate throwing performance to better understand motor deficits in ball catching.
Abstract:
The Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC-2) is a functional test for identifying deficits in the motor performance of children. The test contains a ball-catching task that requires the children to catch a self-thrown ball with one hand. As the task can be executed with a variety of different catching strategies, it is assumed that the task success can also vary considerably. Even though it is not clear, whether the performance merely depends on the catching skills or also to some extent on the throwing skills, the MABC-2 takes into account only the movement outcome. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine (1) to what extent the throwing accuracy has an effect on the children's catching performance and (2) to what extent the throwing accuracy influences their choice of catching strategy. In line with the test manual, the children's catching performance was quantified on basis of the number of correctly caught balls. The throwing accuracy and the catching strategy were quantified by applying a kinematic analysis on the ball's trajectory and the hand movements. Based on linear regression analyses, we then investigated the relation between throwing accuracy, catching performance and catching strategy. The results show that an increased throwing accuracy is significantly correlated with an increased catching performance. Moreover, a higher throwing accuracy is significantly correlated with a longer duration of the hand on the ball's parabola, which indicates that throwing the ball more accurately could enable the children to effectively reduce the requirements on temporal precision. As the children's catching performance and their choice of catching strategy in the ball-catching task of the MABC-2 are substantially determined by their throwing accuracy, the test evaluation should not be based on the movement outcome alone, but should also take into account the children's throwing performance. Our findings could be of particular value for the development of simple but informative catching assessments, and may provide additional insights into the causes of performance deficits in ball catching.
