The River Challenge - a new measure to assess movement competence and creativity in young children

Tracey Joyce, Eivind Aadland, Kine Melfald Tveten
Purpose:

To develop a play-based, feasible measure suitable to assess movement competence and creativity in children aged 3-6 years. Regarding feasibility, the measure must be reasonable to use in field, such as kindergartens or physiotherapy clinics withing a reasonable about of time and limited space.

Methods:

The new measure was developed through observation of children's free play, co-creation with children, field testing in kindergartens with 139 children, discussions in multidisciplinary expert panels and final adjustments. Reliability was examined by 20 video recordings with four different scorers on two occasions, three weeks apart.

Results:

The River Challenge consists of 18 items divided into two different challenges and one open-ended task. Through storytelling, children are invited to demonstrate various locomotor, object control, and balance skills. The items are scored as successful or unsuccessful based on pre-specified criteria. The open-ended task which assesses creativity is scored according to originality based on normative data from field testing. The time to complete the assessment is about 25 minutes per child. (Standardized) resources include a mattress, balls of different sizes, textures and weights, frog puppets, nets and diverse resources for the open-ended task. The river challenge can be assessed in the field and requires a space of 2x3m. The results for inter-rater reliability for challenge 1 and challenge 2 were Cronbach's α =0.94 and 0.69, respectively.  Intra-rater value from the developer of the measure was ICC= 0.99.99.

Conclusion(s):

The River Challenge is feasible and highly enjoyed by children. Initial validation and reliability are promising. Small adjustments are being made for challenge 2 to improve reliability. Further evaluation of psychometric properties such as responsiveness, the smallest detectable change, and validation for a clinical population are relevant before implementation in clinical physiotherapy practice.

Implications:

The River Challenge is currently applied as an outcome measure in an ongoing large-scale cluster randomized controlled trial (MoveEarly) in Norway.

Funding acknowledgements:
Funded by the Research Council of Norway (reference number 325880) and the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.
Keywords:
child development
assessment
innovation
Primary topic:
Paediatrics
Second topic:
Health promotion and wellbeing/healthy ageing/physical activity
Did this work require ethics approval?:
Yes
Name the institution and ethics committee that approved your work:
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences’ ethics committee.
Provide the ethics approval number:
Reference number 22/11664-5
Has any of this material been/due to be published or presented at another national or international conference prior to the World Physiotherapy Congress 2025?:
No

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