Development of “All about Me,” a Scale That Measures Children's Perceived Motor Competence

Abstract

All About Me was developed in response to the concern of pediatric occupational therapists that existing measures of self-concept tend to focus on children older than 8 years of age and include very few items that measure physical competence. This instrument evaluates young children's perception of their self-efficacy in the performance of fine and gross motor activities that they encounter daily. Designed for use by pediatric therapists working with primary school children, it is a discriminative assessment that can be used to identify children who perceive themselves to be less competent motorically or to measure and encourage discussion of self-efficacy in children who have been identified as having motor difficulties. In this article, All About Me is described, and the results are reported of two studies that have pilot-tested the developmental edition. Preliminary evidence indicates that All About Me has adequate to good levels of construct, content, and concurrent validity, internal consistency, and test—retest reliability, and may be a useful tool for both discriminative and descriptive purposes.