WHAT DID THE RESEARCH INVOLVE?
We assessed 9,000 children when they were ages two, three, and four. We sent parents three tasks to do when they were playing with their children: building blocks into a tower, drawing a circle, and folding a piece of paper. All of these involve fine manipulation and control of hand and eye co-ordination.
Whenever you do an assessment with a child, it could be a one-off. Because the children did the tasks at three different ages, it offered us an overall perspective of their fine motor skills during their pre-school years. There were slight variations to makeit age-appropriate across the three years.
Parents were also sent a questionnaire to fill about their children’s fine motor skills.
Because these children are part of a longitudinal cohort, called the Twins Early Development Study, as they’ve grown up we’ve been able to ask the parents and teachers about the children’s behaviour, things like conduct problems, and anxiety and autistic traits, and ADHD. We had lots of time points in which parents and teachers were telling us that information. And when they were age 16 they did their GCSEs, so we were able to look at those results.
The children were born in 1994 to 1996 in England and Wales, so they are now in their 30s.
We pre-registered the work, so we planned what we wanted to do before looking at the data. It is an incredible study that is still ongoing with a strong focus on child development and cognitive ability. We did analyses on the association between the children’s fine motor abilities during the pre-school years and their later behavioural and educational outcomes.
THE CHILDREN WERE FOLLOWED UP AT AGE 16. WHAT DID THE FINDINGS SHOW WITH THEIR GCSE RESULTS?
We were really surprised that these pre-school abilities related to educational outcomes 12 to 14 years later! It’s not a one-to-one mapping, but our results show there is a tendency for fine motor skills to link to better GCSE grades later on. Our results were significant, and they remained significant even after we controlled for the socio-economic factors.
WHAT SURPRISED YOU MOST ABOUT THE FINDINGS?
It’s quite remarkable to find an association like that. Lots happens between pre-school and GCSEs. If you got people to bet ‘Does building blocks at two have anything to do with GCSEs?’ they might say no. The second point is that what we asked children to do, and taking exams in school, are quite different assessments. You wouldn’t typically say when hearing about good GCSE results, ‘It’s lucky they did lots of block building when they were two.’
There has been some work on fine motor skills in older children, but the pre-school period has been largely ignored. It’s rare to have such a large sample. There’s a combination of things that made us really excited about the study.
WHAT DID YOU FIND OUT ABOUT HOW FINE MOTOR SKILLS AFFECT CHILDREN’S BEHAVIOUR PROBLEMS?
Finding fine motor tasks like drawing, folding and block building more challenging was associated with some types of behaviour problems and traits later on. It was interesting to see the breadth of the associations. What I mean is, pre-school fine motor skills were associated with a wide range of traits later on, including ADHD traits, emotional problems and conduction problems. We would love to do some more work on this topic to try to understand the underlying mechanism by which these things are linked.
DO YOU THINK THE STUDY HIGHLIGHTS THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY?
Play is often given secondary importance to say, learning to talk and read, but playing with blocks, drawing, and folding appear to be important too. I think it might be intuitive for someone to think Duplo might be helpful for the child who’s going to become an engineer. But what our results show is it actually links to educational outcomes generally, as well as behavioural control and emotional states. A key thing is that we cannot prove causality from these findings, we’ve got to do more work. They are linking to each other, after controlling for socio-economic factors but we haven’t yet proven that doing more drawing, doing more block building will improve educational and behaviour outcomes. At this point we can say that they are significantly linked.
Getting to know you…
Tell us about your background.
I have always just wanted to study the brain. Really, that’s been my main passion. I studied experimental psychology at university, and I did my PhD on autism.
I’ve researched a range of different ages in childhood. I’ve done some work on primary-school children and teenagers. And now I am completely focused on infants and pre-schoolers, because I feel that that’s where there’s most to gain in terms of benefiting children in the long run.
Is there an area of research that you’re not doing that you’d really like to do?
I think the dream is to have a really large, diverse cohort of infants and pre-schoolers in which we can study causal mechanisms. I think there would be huge gains for our country in that.