Assessing the Development of Fine Motor Control in Elementary School Children Using Drawing and Tracing Tasks

Adequately quantifying fine motor control is imperative for understanding individual motor behavior development and mastery. We recently showed that using different tasks to evaluate fine motor control may produce different results, suggesting that multiple measures for fine motor control may be evaluating different skills and/or underlying processes. Specifically, drawing behavior may depend on internal cueing, whereas tracing depends more on external cueing. To better understand how an individual develops a certain preference for cueing, we evaluated fine motor control in 265 typically developing children (aged 6–11) by measuring their accuracy for both drawing and tracing a circle. Our results first confirmed that there was no significant correlation between tracing and drawing task performances during this phase of development and, secondly, showed a significant developmental improvement in tracing, especially between 2nd and 3rd graders, whereas drawing ability improved only moderately. We discuss the potential roles of attentional focus and cognitive development as possible influencing factors for these developmental patterns. We conclude that using both a drawing and tracing task to evaluate fine motor control is rapid, economic and valuable for monitoring motor development among elementary school children.