Chronological Change in Preschool Children's Motor Ability Development in Japan from the 1960s to the 2000s

Abstract

motor ability is apparent in order to fi nd the causes of the decline and to study how to prevent it. The authors have made nationwide surveys of motor ability in preschool children approximately every ten years over a period of thirty years: in 1966 (Matsuda and Kondo 1968), 1973 (Matsuda, et al., 1975), 1986 (Kondo, et al., 1987), 1997 (Kondo, et al., 1998). The basis for these surveys has been the Test for Preschool Children's Motor Ability, which is developed and revised by the Tokyo University of Education Laboratory of Sport Psychology. The authors compared the survey data with previous data in each survey to estimate changes. During the twenty years between 1966 and 1986, no signifi cant changes in overall motor ability are discernable, with some categories showing improvement, some showing no change, and some others showing a decline. However, a comparison between 1986 and 1997 shows a big fall across all categories. Although it was a nationwide survey utilizing a large sample, we need to be careful to point out the macro tendency of chronological change in motor abilities using only one year's survey data. Therefore, we did a survey in 2002, meaning the survey interval was shortened from approximately ten to fi ve years. No signifi cant changes were observed between 1997 and 2002, demonstrating that the decline was not an anomaly. Thus we can report an overall tendency of the changes in the motor ability of preschool children over about 40 years. Although we conducted surveys fi ve times between 1966 and 2002, personal data was not retained prior to the 1986 survey, so this paper uses statistical data taken in each survey, to analyze the overall tendency of change. No other data is available to show developmental tendencies in the motor abilities of preschool children in Japan since only the authors of this paper have conducted such nationwide surveys. Therefore this data is of importance. As far as the authors know, there is no other report in the world that studies nationwide chronological change in the motor ability of preschool children over as long a period as forty years. We believe that it deserves high evaluation as the data. 2. Methods 2.1. Subjects – The subjects were children of four, fi ve and six years of age In the 1966 and 1973 surveys, both public and private kindergartners all over the country were investigated. In the 1986 survey, we sampled approximately 120 kindergartens and nursery schools, in proportion to the number of kindergarten and nursery school children per prefecture, to take part in the survey. At this time we preferred kindergartens and nursery schools that we had surveyed previously, to lessen sampling errors in chronological comparison. If our request to take part in the survey was declined, we made additional requests in order to keep the sample number near to the correct proportion of schools per prefecture. Table 1 shows the number of subjects and schools in each survey year. The total number of subjects varied according to the test item, as detailed in Table 1. A total of 452 schools cooperated and the total number of children was 50,115.