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On the Problem of Motor Skill Development
Jane E. Clark a
a Department of Kinesiology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
To cite this article: Jane E. Clark (2007): On the Problem of Motor Skill Development, Journal of Physical Education,
Recreation & Dance, 78:5, 39-44
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39
JOPERD • Volume 78 No. 5 • May/June 2007
As we begin the 21st century, the United States is in the midst of an obe-
sity epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported
in 2004 that almost 18.8 percent of all children ages six to 11 and 17.4
percent of youths 12 to 19 are overweight (Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, 2007). As a way to address this serious issue, countless physical
education classes have become fi tness centers designed to raise heart rates and burn
calories. No one takes issue with providing children more physical activity time, but
an unintended consequence of this renewed fi tness emphasis is the lack of atten-
tion to motor skill development. What are the implications of de-emphasizing the
acquisition of motor skills in our physical education programs? This is not a new
problem. Motor skill development, as a curricular focus, has long been marginalized
in physical education. In this article, based on my Alliance Scholar lecture given at
the 2007 AAHPERD convention in Baltimore, I discuss the problem of motor skill
development with an eye to understanding why it has languished as a critical cur-
ricular focus in physical education and why it is important to keep it in our physical
education programs. In addition, I include fi ndings from the research I have done
over the last four decades on the development of motor skills.
The Maturation Misconception
The misconception that maturation underlies infants’ and children’s motor skill
development undermines both research and the need for instruction and practice
of motor skills in the early years. The view that maturation is the driving force be-
hind an infant’s changing motor behavior pervades our thinking about the motor
development of toddlers, preschoolers, and young children in the early elementary
grades. Running, jumping, galloping, hopping, kicking, throwing, and catching are
among the many motor skills that seem to appear one day in the child’s collection
of newly found behaviors. Or so it would seem. Parents and educators have a strong
sense that teaching motor skills to children is unnecessary until children are perhaps
eight or 10 years old, when specifi c sport skills are introduced. This seems to be a
deeply held misconception. What else could explain the lack of a requirement for
daily physical education that would include motor skill instruction in the preschool
and early elementary school years? But if motor skills do not develop primarily
through maturation, then how do they develop?
In the fi rst year of life, an infant progresses from a helpless newborn who can
barely lift its head to the active walking toddler capable of using its hands to grab
toys, food, and a variety of objects. Each month, the toddler almost miraculously
learns new skills. One month the infant is sitting, and the next crawling. Infants
appear to progress through the same sequences—rolling over, sitting, crawling,
standing, and fi nally, around the infant’s fi rst birthday, walking. For the infant’s
parents, these motor skills “just mature.” Since no one teaches the infant how to
sit or stand, a belief emerges in the culture’s folklore that maturation is the cause
On the Problem of Motor Skill Development
JANE E. CLARK
Jane E. Clark,
2007 Alliance Scholar lecturer
2007Alliance Scholar Lecture
Motor skills do not develop miraculously from one day to the next. They must be taught and practiced.
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40 JOPERD • Volume 78 No. 5 • May/June 2007
of these advancements in the infant’s motor repertoire. In
this sense, maturation would mean that these motor skills
emerge regardless of the environment and without instruc-
tion or specifi c practice—as if these behaviors were “wired”
into our bodies from the beginning of life. The problem with
maturation as an explanation of motor skill development is
that it is wrong.
Few would dispute the fact that certain motor behaviors,
such as refl exes, are embedded in the newborn’s nervous
system. But the other motor behaviors of infancy, those that
are called species-typical or phylogenetic, are far less prede-
termined. Indeed, these species-typical behaviors require
environmental support for their appearance; however, this
support is minimal and nonspecifi c. In fact, research would
suggest that the environment needs to be “just good enough”
for these preadapted behaviors to appear. This is the type of
environment in which most infants grow up. But imagine an
infant born in a space station circling Earth, where the pull
of gravity is one-sixth of Earth’s gravitational pull. Would
we see sitting, standing, and walking emerging as we do on
Earth? It would be unlikely, as most of our motor behaviors
are in response to and modulated by gravity. Without Earth’s
large gravitational force, head and trunk control would be
attained almost at birth, not at fi ve or six months as it typi-
cally is. If maturation were the correct explanation for motor
skill development, then it would not matter whether the
infant was born on the moon or on Earth; the sequence of
motor behaviors would unfold in the same way, regardless
of the environment.
Motor Skill Development Is a Lifelong Journey
The belief that maturation is how motor skills develop puts
more emphasis on the biological or hereditary aspects than
on environmental factors. But the process by which motor
skills develop is more complex. Motor skills change through
an interactive process between the individual’s biological con-
straints and the environment. The central nervous system,
the muscles, and the skeleton all develop; some changes
are prescribed by heredity, but our biological heritage is
modulated continuously by our environment and our life
experiences.
Humans come with preadapted motor behaviors that are
built into the central nervous system. But even refl exes, such
as the sucking and grasp refl exes, are quickly modifi ed by the
infant’s experiences in the world. For the species’ survival,
these early experiences open a dialogue between the newborn
and its new stimulus-rich world. This dialogue provides a
cycle of perception and action with consequences. Hand
(palm) contact with an adult’s strand of hair results in the
all-too-well-known hair grasp by the infant. The grasp refl ex
action gives the infant both sensory information about the
hair in the hand (helping to form a perception of hair) and a
social interaction with the adult. The infant’s waking hours
are fi lled with such cycles of action and perception, each
providing the infant with a rich and rapidly expanding col-
lection of perceptual-motor experiences. These experiences,
of course, are not just for babies. All of our lives are spent
expanding and adapting to our perceptual-motor experi-
ences, and these experiences help to shape our motor skills
as they change throughout our life.
While the infant is born with innate motor patterns, these
patterns are a basis for the development of motor skills that
appear later. The process by which our motor skills change
over time is not maturation, but adaptation and learning.
These inborn motor patterns prepare the infant to adapt to
its new world. They provide a basis that experience modi-
fi es and, over time, that the infant incorporates into more
and more complex patterns of coordination that are better
adapted to the environment.
I wrote two papers that provide a framework for this lifes-
pan view of motor skill development (Clark, 1994; Clark &
Metcalfe, 2002). They focused on describing the development
of motor skills—not just any motor behavior, but those that
are voluntary, goal-directed, and consistently performed. To
identify these lifespan changes, the framework needed to
describe the developmental characteristics that have been
documented in the research literature. For example, dur-
ing an individual’s life there are periods of stability when
behaviors seem to form a coherent assembly that we might
label as typical for that time in a person’s life. These periods
would be expected to follow a specifi c order and would build
one upon the other. The directionality in which the changes
progress (toward some goal or end) would also be implied in
a developmental framework.
With these characteristics in mind, we selected the meta-
phor of a journey up a mountain to illustrate the develop-
Photo by Faye Egre
A fi rst-grade student completes a modifi ed vault. Motor skills
need to be learned and practiced; they are not automatically
acquired through maturation.
Downloaded by [Jane Clark] at 14:00 24 March 2013
41
JOPERD • Volume 78 No. 5 • May/June 2007
ment of motor skills (Clark & Metcalfe, 2002). The “mountain
of motor development” provides a framework to describe the
global changes that occur in our motor skills from birth to
death. Figure 1 is a schematic of the mountain broken into
its many periods. Since the mountain has been described in
detail in my previous two papers, I will only briefl y describe
it here and focus most of my attention on the preadapted
period and the fundamental motor patterns period, on which
my research has been centered.
The mountain’s base sits upon the prenatal period, when
the fetus, in the last two trimesters, is quite busy moving.
But our mountain metaphor begins at birth with the refl exive
period, which represents the infant’s behaviors in the fi rst two
weeks of life as the infant adjusts to the bright, buzzing, and
gravitational world. Refl exes, such as the rooting, sucking,
and gag, insure the infant’s survival. But very quickly (after
about two weeks), the infant’s behaviors are more sponta-
neous than refl exive, and some are actually goal-directed.
This marks the beginning of the preadapted period, in which
species-typical movements dominate. This period ends when
the infant has attained the two most fundamental motor
behaviors: independent walking and self-feeding. At that
point, the human infant has all that it needs to “survive” at
the most primitive level. The next period, the fundamental
motor patterns period, is characterized by the acquisition of
the basic coordinative patterns that form the basis for later-
emerging sport, dance, game, and other culturally promoted
motor skills. The fourth period, the context-specifi c motor
skills period, is the stage in which patterns are modifi ed for
a specifi c purpose (e.g., running is modifi ed for running the
hurdles, or the striking pattern is adapted to sports such as
baseball, tennis, and golf). Sitting at the top of the moun-
tain is the skillfulness period. Reaching the top period of the
mountain means the person has become a skilled motor
performer. While there is a continuum of skillfulness that
we all recognize, crossing the threshold into skillfulness
puts the mover into this period, but clearly it is a long trek
to the summit. For example, high school varsity athletes are
skilled, but college players and professional athletes are more
skilled. From playing high school basketball to playing at
the professional level is a long and diffi cult journey; in the
same way, a mountain climber might say that the last stage
of getting to a mountain’s summit is the most demanding.
It is also important to note that we do not stay at the top of
the mountain forever. When injury, aging, and other changes
occur in our body, we adjust our motor performance to ac-
commodate these changes. Thus, the compensation period
represents that time in our motor development journey when
we must compensate for these biological changes. Perhaps
the injury will heal and we can return to our mountain
climb. Or perhaps these bodily changes will result in our
being less skillful than we once were, perhaps returning to
a lower period on the mountain.
The Foundation Patterns of Coordination
From a theoretical and practical basis, the early periods when
the preadapted and fundamental motor patterns develop ap-
pear to be the most critical to later skill attainment. Seefeldt
(1980) suggested that if these patterns were not acquired, the
child would encounter a “profi ciency barrier” when trying
to learn the transitional motor skills that lead to skillfulness.
But what is it about these motor patterns that make them
“fundamental” or essential to later skillfulness?
Figure 2 shows a young boy trying to balance on a small
plate. To succeed at this task, all the body’s segments (head,
trunk, arms, and legs) have to align so that the pull of grav-
ity is directly over the base of support (i.e., the foot). Small
deviations from this alignment create a torque that pulls the
body toward the ground. As with this child, the body has to
fi nd a way to regain that balance. Clearly this is not an easy
task. Indeed, it takes almost six months for a human infant
to learn to sit without support (a position with a very wide
base compared to balancing on one foot). The human body’s
segmentation provides for a wonderful array of movements,
but it also presents an incredible management problem for
the neuromuscular system. Between each segment, there is
a joint. Each joint is a potential location for collapse. As we
move, each of these joint-segment combinations must be
controlled. At birth, no segment is controlled. The top heavy
head and trunk must be supported by the caregiver. It is not
until about two months after birth that the infant is able to
lift its head off the blanket and that is only when it is lying
on its tummy. Months will go by before rolling over and prop
sitting will occur. Standing alone and walking are achieved
almost a year after birth. Clearly, learning to control and
coordinate our multisegmented body is a long process.
For years, I studied two of these fundamental patterns of
coordination: walking and jumping. In a series of studies on
jumping (Clark & Phillips, 1985; Clark, Phillips, & Petersen,
1989; DiRocco, Clark, & Phillips, 1987; Jensen, Clark, &
Phillips, 1994; Phillips, Clark, & Petersen, 1985; Phillips &
Clark, 1997), we found that from the age of three to adult-
Figure 1. The Mountain of Motor Development
COMPENSATION
SKILLFULNESS (11 yrs...onwards)
CONTEXT-SPECIFIC MOTOR SKILLS
(7 yrs...11 yrs)
Profi ciency Barrier
FUNDAMENTAL MOTOR PATTERNS
(1 yr...~7 yrs)
PREADAPTED period
(2 wks to~1 yr)
REFLEXIVE period
(birth to 2 wks)
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42 JOPERD • Volume 78 No. 5 • May/June 2007
hood, there was an invariant coordination pattern for the
hip, knee, and ankle (or the thigh, shank, and foot) as the
jumpers extended their legs to create the force to lift the
body off the ground. While we can see qualitatively different
spatial patterns (the young children do not optimize their
take-off angles for either vertical or horizontal jumps), the
underlying force-producing pattern of coordination is the
same across ages and outcome performances (i.e., how high
or long they jump). These fi ndings do not mean that jumping
is innate and that no instruction or practice are needed. Quite
the contrary, our results show that children must learn how
to produce a jump that maximizes the height or the length
of the jump. This involves learning to coordinate the arms,
legs, and trunk before the take-off extension. It also means
that children must learn to control the forces created by the
segmental actions so as to maximize the take-off angle. Our
cross-sectional studies suggest that skillful jumping takes
many years to learn.
Similarly, our research on the development of walking
revealed the early appearance of fundamental interlimb
and intralimb coordination (Clark & Phillips, 1987; Clark
& Phillips, 1991; Clark & Phillips, 1992; Clark & Phillips,
1993; Clark, Truly, & Phillips, 1990; Clark & Whitall, 1989;
Clark, Whitall, & Phillips, 1988; Forrester, Phillips, & Clark,
1993; Whitall, Block, & Clark, 1992). But again, it was the
fl exibility and control of these coordinative patterns that
emerged with increasing locomotor experience. Indeed it was
in this latter set of studies that the idea of probing the rate
limiter to the development of motor skills emerged. When
infants were just learning to walk, for example, we found
that giving them a light touch stabilized their interlimb
coordination to that of an infant who had been walking for
a month (Clark et al., 1988). Similarly, when infants fi rst
walk, they spend most of their time with both feet on the
ground. It is not until they have been walking for about two
months that they walk with the same stance proportion as
adults (Clark & Phillips, 1993). Again as in our earlier work,
we proposed that postural control was limiting the rate of
locomotor development in the infants.
In fact, in both jumping and walking development, chil-
dren struggled with postural control. Much like the child in
Figure 2, the problem of generating the segmental forces to
jump, walk, run, gallop, or skip creates a considerable chal-
lenge to the neuromuscular system of the developing child.
Part of that challenge is how to manage the destabilizing
forces that threaten our balance. Does postural control de-
velop? And if so, how does it develop? What develops when
postural control changes across the lifespan?
Postural Control: An Important Process
Postural control involves not only balance, but also the
ability to assume and maintain a desired orientation. Every
movement we make involves postural control. Whether we
are standing quietly, running, hitting a tennis ball, or sit-
ting at a desk, gravity is always acting on our bodies. The
gravitational forces must be managed in all of our actions.
To accomplish this, the central nervous system (CNS) must
know where the body is: its orientation to the support sur-
face as well as the positions of all the segments and their
relationship to one another.
To help the CNS monitor the body, we have three major
sensory systems. The vestibular sensors, located in the inner
ear, are composed of the semicircular canals and the otolith
organs (the utricle and the saccule). These sensors provide
feedback to the CNS about the head’s rotational movements
(the semicircular canals) and the head’s linear acceleration
and its orientation to gravity (otoliths). Vision sensors pro-
vide information about what is in the environment as well
as our movement in that environment. Both the vestibular
and visual sensors are located in the head, whereas the third
group of sensors is distributed throughout the entire body.
This group is referred to as proprioceptors. They include the
joint and muscle receptors as well as the pressure receptors
that are located under the skin. Each of these sensors con-
tinuously sends information to the CNS about where the
body is at any one moment. It is the task of the CNS to use
this information to adjust the body’s position in order to
maintain or assume new positions.
This sensory feedback is critical to postural control, but it
has one important limitation: it is time delayed. Beginning
from the moment the sensor is stimulated, the delay includes
the time it takes the signal to reach the brain; the time the
brain takes to decipher the information, decide what needs
to be done, and issue a motor command; and the travel time
used by the command to reach the relevant body part. In
Figure 2. A Balancing Task
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43
JOPERD • Volume 78 No. 5 • May/June 2007
many cases, this time delay is too long, rendering the sensory
information useless for postural control. To work around this
time delay, the CNS estimates where the body will be in the
future and actually issues motor commands before receiving
the sensory feedback. In other words, the CNS anticipates.
This is an important ability that takes time to develop. In
our studies of infant postural development (Barela, Jeka, &
Clark, 1999; Chen, Metcalfe, Jeka, & Clark, 2007), predic-
tive or anticipatory behavior is evident in infants about two
months after they start to walk. Perhaps it is the dynamic
experience of moving upright over two little feet that pushes
this capacity to the forefront.
Our conceptualization of this predictive ability suggests
that our CNS develops an internal model or sensorimotor
map of the body and its world. This internal model provides
us with an estimation of where we are and a prediction about
where we will be if we carry out a particular movement. To
build such an internal model requires that we have experi-
ences that couple sensory information with movement
repeatedly and with variation. Thus as the child stands
up, attempts to step, and falls, the internal model uses this
perception-action cycle to build up something like a body
schema. The repeated attempts, successful and unsuccessful,
enhance the internal model so that after a few months of
independent walking, the infant can walk without falling
despite creating a wide range of large torques as the trunk
perches precariously atop the two wobbly legs. This concept
of an internal model is just that: a concept. But as such, it
provides us with a useful way to think about how the CNS
is using perceptual-motor experiences to become more
skillful. A strong internal model would allow for quick and
reliable actions that constitute the graceful movements of
the skilled performer.
The importance of postural control is striking in those fi rst
walking steps of the infant, but postural control is in every
movement that we make, no matter our age or experience.
This is very evident in children who are sometimes labeled
“clumsy.” Balancing on one foot can be almost impossible
for these children. And the lack of postural control has the
potential to make all their attempts to learn motor skills more
diffi cult. We have been studying these children for the last
few years. Years ago, they were merely classifi ed as clumsy.
Today, through careful screening, they may be diagnosed
as having developmental coordination disorder (DCD). For
more information on DCD, please see an article we wrote for
this journal in 2005 (Clark, Getchell, Smiley-Oyen, & Whitall,
2005). Our fi ndings from research with these children suggest
that their internal models for movement are more broadly
tuned than their age-matched peers (Kagerer, Bo, Contreras-
Vidal, & Clark, 2004; Kagerer, Contreras-Vidal, Bo, & Clark,
2006). This leads to the variable and inaccurate movements
that are characteristic of children with DCD.
Teaching for Motor Skill Development
Motor skills do not just come as birthday presents. They must
be nurtured, promoted, and practiced. If we recognize the
cultural misconception that motor skills just mature, then we
must be proactive in dispelling that misconception. Motor
skills take years to develop and require specifi c experiences
and instruction. It is, therefore, important that motor skill
development remain a central focus of physical education
curricula. Teaching motor skills is not mutually exclusive with
children being physically active. Indeed, if children do not
feel a sense of effi cacy regarding their motor skills, they are
less likely to participate in physical activities as they grow
older. If a child does not have good balance and has had
limited experience and few locomotor skills, then he or she
is not likely to accompany other children to a roller-skating
or ice-skating party. A strong motor skill foundation at the
start provides for new movement opportunities later in life
such as skiing, rock climbing, tennis, golf, and many others
that arise as we continue on our motor development jour-
ney. Just as educators recognize the importance of reading
literacy to a lifetime of reading, physical educators need to
recognize the importance of motor literacy for a lifetime of
physical activity.
Also critical to the development of motor skillfulness is
postural control. Although often assumed not to require
specifi c instruction, postural control is learned and does
require practice and instruction. Physical education teachers
should remember to specifi cally teach for postural control
by modifying tasks so as to reduce the base of support,
change the body’s orientation, or carry objects that make
postural management more diffi cult. The body’s internal
model for movement and postural control need many
and varied experiences to form a strong, reliable sense of
where we are and what will happen when we make spe-
cifi c movements.
Children who leave elementary school without a strong
foundation of motor skills are “left behind” in the same
way that children are left behind when they leave without
the prerequisite language or mathematical skills. At high
school graduation, students who leave without a sport or
other movement form and without the motor skills to learn
new skills are also “left behind.” As a profession, physical
education needs to battle the maturation myth and teach
motor skills from preschool to high school. Motor literacy
is as important as reading literacy. If we want a nation of
physically active citizens, then we need to help them acquire
the motor skills that will allow them to participate in a wide
range of physical activities. Physical education is the best
public health delivery system our nation has. We need to
exploit it as we promote both physical activity and motor
skill development.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank all her colleagues and students who
have signifi cantly contributed to the works cited here. Thanks also to
all the infants, children, and parents who gave so willingly of their
time to participate in our studies. Without their collaboration, there
would be no scientifi c advances. Finally, this work was supported
by NIH HD42527 grant.
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44 JOPERD • Volume 78 No. 5 • May/June 2007
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Jane E. Clark (jeclark@umd.edu) is a professor and chair of the
Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland in College
Park, MD 20742.
Donham-Foutch
Continued from page 38
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Shae Donham-Foutch (colemasl@nsuok.edu) is an associate pro-
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