Differentiation of learning disabled children from normal children using four coordination tasks.

Fifty 8-year-old children, 25 classified as normal and 25 as learning disabled, participated in a study to determine whether they could be differentiated into their respective groups by using four tasks from the Devereux Test of Extremity Coordination: opposition, foot patting, finger wiggling, and heel-toe walking with the eyes closed. Each chilld received numerical scores based on the number of times he could perform a task in 10 seconds. A stepwise discriminant function analysis revealed that two tasks, opposition and foot patting, were significant discriminating variables. A resulting discriminant function prediction equation showed that, according to the results of the tasks tested, 78 percent of the sample had been correctly classified by previous methods.