Abstract
Motor impairment is common in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and, as such, a potential target for interventions to improve adaptive functioning. This study investigated motor skill acquisition in children with ASD (n = 15, 12 males; ages 7–16 years) during iCan Bike Camp, a 1-week, community-based intervention (5 × 75-min sessions) to teach independent bicycle riding. After completing the camp’s task-oriented, individualized training program, all participants demonstrated motor skill acquisition on the bicycle, and nine participants rode independently at least 70 feet. Exploratory analyses showed that motor coordination and social communication correlated with rates of skill acquisition. These findings indicate the feasibility and efficacy of brief, community-based motor interventions to teach bicycle riding—an important developmental skill supporting adaptive functioning—to children with ASD.
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Notes
ASD severity operationalized per Social Responsiveness Scale-2 age norms (Constantino and Gruber 2012).
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Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U54 HD087011 (the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center at Washington University) and National Institute of Mental Health (K08 MH112891 to NM). We would like to thank the Bike Camp participants and their families, the volunteers who served as spotters, the Missouri Families for Effective Autism Treatment (MO-FEAT), who hosted the camp, and the iCan Shine organization, who runs the camp. We would also like to thank Lauren Castelbaum, Jordan Albright, and Danielle Abrams for assistance with data collection.
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All authors contributed to the study conception, design, and material preparation. Data were collected by ZH, CW, and NM. ZH completed the data analysis and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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ZH, CW, and NM declare that they have no conflict of interest. JNC receives royalties from Western Psychological Services for commercial distribution of the Social Responsiveness Scale-2.
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All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee (Washington University School of Medicine IRB #201804135) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Specifically, participants and their parents provided verbal assent and written consent, respectively.
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Hawks, Z., Constantino, J.N., Weichselbaum, C. et al. Accelerating Motor Skill Acquisition for Bicycle Riding in Children with ASD: A Pilot Study. J Autism Dev Disord 50, 342–348 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-04224-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-04224-5