IPL/2021/MCA_VAL_ESELx | [MCA_VAL] Fiabilidade inter-observador e validade concorrente do instrumento “Motor Competence Assessment” de crianças dos 6 aos 10 anos

Motor competence (MC) is a crucial variable for the development of human movement, physical activity, sports participation and an active lifestyle, acting directly on physical fitness related to the health of individuals and motor literacy (Stodden et al. 2008). CM refers to the quality of human movement performance and is defined as a person's ability to be proficient in a wide range of locomotor, stability, and manipulative motor skills (Utesch and Bardid 2019). Despite the importance attributed to MC, the way to evaluate it has not been unanimous and until recently there was no instrument to evaluate it in its three components. Therefore, the creation and validation of an instrument to assess CM is relevant for a healthier development of children. Over the last 5 years, our research team created the Motor Competence Assessment (MCA), a CM assessment instrument, with its construct validity having already been established (Luz et al. 2016) and the results subsequently being published. normative values for the Portuguese population aged 3 to 23 (Rodrigues et al. 2019). Meanwhile, MCA has been used by our research team in several characterization and comparison studies (Luz et al. 2019; Luz, Cordovil, et al. 2017; Luz, Rodrigues, et al. 2017; Sá et al. 2021) and very recently in evaluating the effects of inactivity forced by COVID-19 confinement on Portuguese children (Pombo et al. 2021). The aim of this project is to expand our current research by completing the concurrent validation and inter-observer reliability of the MCA from 6 to 10 years of age. Therefore, we will evaluate 100 children aged 6 to 10. In a first phase and to assess the concurrent validation of the MCA, we intend to evaluate and compare the results in 3 CM assessment instruments, namely the MCA, the ABC movement and the Dragon Challenge. The choice of these instruments as comparison instruments for the MCA is due to the fact that one instrument assesses the 3 components of motor competence (movement ABC) and the other instrument is recently designed to assess the motor component of physical literacy in the form of circuit with some acceptance in the scientific community (Dragon Challenge). In a second phase, and with the objective of evaluating the inter-observer reliability of the MCA, we will use two evaluators simultaneously to evaluate this instrument.