Motor Development & Adapted Physical Education in Children

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This project spans the assessment of children’s motor competence and the planning and evaluation of inclusive physical education practice.

Motor competence assessment and inclusive physical education research in school-aged children.

This research line examines how children develop the fundamental movement skills that underpin lifelong physical activity, and how physical education can be adapted and made inclusive for the full range of learners in a classroom — not designed around an assumed “typical” child.

Motor competence profiles

Motor competence is a key indicator of children’s developmental readiness and a core component of health and well-being education, but it is domain-specific rather than a single global skill: a child can be strong in one movement domain and behind in another. In a cross-sectional study of 312 Greek primary school children (aged 6-12) assessed with the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-Second Edition (MABC-2), we used multilevel modeling to examine how sex, age, and classroom context shape manual dexterity, aiming-catching, and balance. Balance emerged as the strongest domain and manual dexterity the weakest, boys outperformed girls in aiming-catching, and a child’s age relative to classmates was negatively associated specifically with manual dexterity — while classroom-level factors explained substantial additional variance across all domains. The results point to manual dexterity as a priority for curriculum development, and show that age-related effects on motor competence operate selectively by skill domain rather than uniformly.

This work was presented at EUCAPA 2026 (Prague) and published in Children (2026), in collaboration with Christina Evaggelinou, Dimitra Dimitropoulou, Theodoros Ellinoudis, and Ermioni Katartzi.

Inclusion in physical education

A parallel strand of this research line looks beyond motor skill itself to the social and attitudinal conditions that determine whether inclusive physical education actually works in practice. Using the CAIPE-R instrument (“Inclusion Stories in Physical Education”), I am leading a three-level linear mixed-model reanalysis examining how a school-based inclusive PE environment shapes students’ attitudes and behavioral intentions toward classmates with disabilities, including a mediation analysis grounded in the theory of planned behavior. This manuscript is currently in preparation.

Together, these two strands — characterizing what motor competence looks like across a diverse student population, and understanding how attitudes and program design shape inclusion in practice — form the applied, child-focused half of my two-pillar research program, complementing my neurorehabilitation work in adults.

Alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals

This research line speaks directly to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, most closely SDG 4 (Quality Education) — in particular Target 4.5, which calls for eliminating disparities and ensuring equal access to education for children with disabilities — and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), which frames disability-inclusive participation as a matter of social inclusion rather than accommodation. Characterizing domain-specific motor competence profiles supplies the evidence base curricula need to close gaps in manual dexterity, aiming-catching, and balance, while the CAIPE-R work on peer attitudes addresses the social barriers that determine whether an inclusive PE classroom functions in practice and not only on paper. The broader goal of physically literate, socially included children also supports SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being), given the well-established link between childhood motor competence and lifelong physical activity participation.

Teaching Motor Development and Inclusive Physical Education

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Most of my time as a researcher is spent generating findings. Teaching is where I find out whether those findings actually mean anything to the people who’ll use them.

Two teaching roles, two audiences

As a Fixed-Term Lecturer at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, I taught undergraduate courses in Motor Development and Inclusive Programs in Physical Education at the School of Physical Education and Sport Science in Serres — training future physical educators to recognize typical and atypical movement development, and to adapt activities, equipment, and instruction for students with disabilities in mainstream and inclusive settings. Earlier, as Substitute Faculty at the University of Extremadura, I taught Biomechanics, Motor Control, and Motor Development — the more mechanistic foundations that the applied, inclusive-education courses build on.

Teaching both sides has been useful in a way I didn’t fully anticipate going in. Students in a biomechanics course want to know how a movement works; students in an inclusive PE course want to know what to do when a movement doesn’t develop the way a textbook says it should. Neither question is complete without the other, and having taught both, I try not to let a course drift too far toward one at the expense of the other.

What adapting instruction actually requires

A recurring theme across both courses — and one that maps directly onto how I think about my own research — is that adapting physical activity for a learner’s functional potential isn’t a single skill. It requires understanding the pathophysiology or developmental basis of why a movement pattern looks the way it does, the pedagogical skill to adjust instruction, rules, and equipment without losing the point of the activity, and a working sense of how to safely progress a program as a student’s ability changes. Trying to teach only one of those pieces produces graduates who can describe a movement disorder accurately but can’t design a class session around it, or who can run an engaging inclusive PE session but can’t explain why a particular adaptation works.

Why this belongs on a research site

I don’t separate my teaching from my research program, and I don’t think the two should be separated. The motor competence work I do with children, and the mechanistic work I do in neurorehabilitation, are both meant to eventually inform how physical educators and clinicians are trained — which means teaching isn’t a duty alongside the research, it’s one of the intended outputs of it.

Inclusive Education | Andreas Skiadopoulos