Effectiveness of the Cognitive Orientation to Daily Occupational Performance Group Approach for Children With Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) - ECOOPG

Methodology:

The study design used is Single Case Experimental Design (SCED) methodology with multiple baseline design across subjects. The principle of SCED is based on the fact that each subject is his own control. The judgment criterion is repeated at least 5 times before initiating the intervention (Baseline phase), then repeated during the intervention (intervention phase) and after intervention (follow-up phase). It is the demonstration of 3 effects, represented here by at least 3 patients in parallel per group, which leads to the conclusion that the intervention is effective.

The children will be randomly integrated into the protocol according to the Wampold - Worsham procedure. Each child will be randomly assigned to the 4 potential positions, shifted in the multiple baseline plane of the SCED protocol of this study.

The SCED methodology uses an analysis of data and statistics specifics. The first phase of analysis will be a visual analysis of the differential between two contiguous phases on three specific aspects: the level, the trend and the variability of the dependent variable studied. Then, a statistical analysis specific to SCED protocols is possible. The use of random sequential introduction procedure such as Wampold - Worsham allows to extract a p value for each patient. This probability p is based on the rank of the mean corresponding to the real transitions among other hypothetical possible transitions of the SCED protocol. Then, the statistical analysis takes into account the overlap rate by calculating the number of overlapping points between the phases : the more overlap there is between two phases, the less the intervention effect is present. Conversely, if two phases show no overlap of measures, the intervention is likely to have a larger effect. Many overlap techniques exist. Those used for this study will be the "Non-overlap of All Pairs - NAP" technique, the Tau-U and Tau-U corrected from the baseline.

The main dependent variable is an evaluation of the performance level of target motor coordination worked for each patient in groups on video with the Performance Quality Rating Scales (PQRS). The PQRS is a 10-point Likert scale used to assess performance and change in performance directly during the patient's motor performance recorded on video for this study. The PQRS is a Likert scale from 1 (very poor performance) to 10 (very strong performance) conventionally used in the literature on CO-OP. The performance criteria will be determined for each point of the Likert scale a priori for each objective.