Reliability of the Purdue Pegboard and Two-Point Discrimination Tests in School Students with Developmental Dysgraphia

Developmental dysgraphia is a kind of learning disabilities in school students. Evaluation of the sensory and motor skills in hand of these persons by appropriate, functional and real tests demonstrates that their fine and complex hand sensory-motor abilities are prerequisites of intervention planning. Purdue Pegboard and Two-Point Discrimination Tests are used for evaluation of the hand motor and sensory skills respectively. This study was aimed to evaluate the test-retest reliability of these tests in students with developmental dysgraphia. In this descriptive-analytic study hand sensory-motor skills were evaluated in 23 students with developmental dysgraphia (8-11 years) in Tabriz city by Purdue Pegboard and static and moving Two-Point Discrimination tests. Test-retest reliability of mentioned tests was done between and within examiners via intra-class correlation coefficient and independent t-test was done for the comparison of the skills between girls and boys and right and left-handed students and Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated for the relationship between motor and sensory skills. Intra-class correlation coefficients of Purdue Pegboard, static and moving two-point discrimination tests for inter-session and intra-session reliability were ranged from 0.77 to 0.94 and 0.69 to 0.92 respectively. There was no significant relationship between motor and sensory skills (p>0.05). Because of high reliability of these tests, it can be used them for evaluating the sensory-motor skills and intervention planning in students with developmental dysgraphia. Loss of relationship between motor and sensory skills can be related to the pathology of dysgraphia that needs further researches.