Rater reliability of the adapted scoring criteria of the Minnesota Handwriting Assessment for children with cerebral palsy

Authors: Tam, Cynthia; Ryan, Stephen E.; Rigby, Patty; Sophianopoulos, Mary-Beth

Source: Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, Volume 56, Number 6, December 2009 , pp. 403-408(6)

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Abstract:

Background/aim:

Current handwriting assessment tools are standardised mostly on typically developing students. This study estimated the intrarater and interrater reliabilities of the adapted scoring criteria, titled the Minnesota Handwriting Assessment-Cerebral Palsy (MHA-CP), for evaluating the effectiveness of handwriting interventions for children with cerebral palsy. Methods:

We scored two batches of 20 random samples each from 80 handwriting samples produced by 30 children with cerebral palsy using the MHA-CP to estimate the intrarater and interrater reliabilities, respectively. Results:

Intraclass correlation coefficients exceeded 0.95 for both intrarater and interrater reliabilities for all quality subscales of the MHA-CP. Conclusions:

The MHA-CP is shown to be a reliable measure of the manuscript handwriting performance of children with cerebral palsy who are in Grades 1 and 2. Further empirical testing is recommended to confirm its validity as an outcome measure for this population.

Keywords: cerebral palsy; child; handwriting; outcome assessment; reproducibility of results

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1440-1630.2009.00804.x

Publication date: 2009-12-01