Child-report measures of occupational performance: A systematic review

© Copyright 2016 Cordier et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Introduction Improving occupational performance is a key service of occupational therapists and client-centred approach to care is central to clinical practice. As such it is important to comprehensively evaluate the quality of psychometric properties reported across measures of occupational performance; in order to guide assessment and treatment planning. Objective To systematically review the literature on the psychometric properties of child-report measures of occupational performance for children ages 2-18 years. Methods A systematic search of the following six electronic databases was conducted: CINAHL; Psy-cINFO; EMBASE; PubMed; the Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HAPI) database; and Google Scholar. The quality of the studies was evaluated against the COSMIN taxonomy of measurement properties and the overall quality of psychometric properties was evaluated using pre-set psychometric criteria. Results Fifteen articles and one manual were reviewed to assess the psychometric properties of the six measures-the PEGS, MMD, CAPE, PAC, COSA, and OSA- which met the inclusion criteria. Most of the measures had conducted good quality studies to evaluate the psychometric properties of measures (PEGS, CAPE, PAC, OSA); however, the quality of the studies for two of these measures was relatively weak (MMD, COSA). When integrating the quality of the psychometric properties of the measures with the quality of the studies, the PAC stood out as having superior psychometric qualities. Conclusions The overall quality of the psychometric properties of most measures was limited. There is a need for continuing research into the psychometric properties of child-report measures of occupational performance, and to revise and improve the psychometric properties of existing measures

Assessment of motor functioning in the preschool period

The assessment of motor functioning in young children has become increasingly important in recent years with the acknowledgement that motor impairment is linked with cognitive, language, social and emotional difficulties. However, there is no one gold standard assessment tool to investigate motor ability in children. The aim of the current paper was to discuss the issues related to the assessment of motor ability in young pre-school children and to provide guidelines on the best approach for motor assessment. The paper discusses the maturational changes in brain development at the preschool level in relation to motor ability. Other issues include sex differences in motor ability at this young age, and evidence for this in relation to sociological versus biological influences. From the previous literature it is unclear what needs to be assessed in relation to motor functioning. Should the focus be underlying motor processes or movement skill assessment? Several key assessment tools are discussed that produce a general measure of motor performance followed by a description of tools that assess specific skills, such as fine and gross motor, ball and graphomotor skills. The paper concludes with recommendations on the best approach in assessing motor function in pre-school children

Loss of function of the carbon catabolite repressor CreA leads to low but inducer‐independent expression from the feruloyl esterase B promoter in Aspergillus niger

OBJECTIVE: With the aim to decipher the mechanisms involved in the transcriptional regulation of feruloyl esterase encoded by faeB, a genetic screen was performed to isolate A. niger mutants displaying inducer-independent expression from the faeB promoter. RESULT: PfaeB-amdS and PfaeB-lux dual reporter strains were constructed and used to isolate trans-acting mutants in which the expression of both reporters was increased, based on the ability to grow on acetamide plates and higher luciferase activity, respectively. The genetic screen on the non-inducing carbon source D-fructose yielded in total 111 trans-acting mutants. The genome of one of the mutants was sequenced and revealed several SNPs, including a point mutation in the creA gene encoding a transcription factor known to be involved in carbon catabolite repression. Subsequently, all mutants were analyzed for defects in carbon catabolite repression by determining sensitivity towards allyl alcohol. All except four of the 111 mutants were sensitive to allyl alcohol, indicating that the vast majority of the mutants are defective in carbon catabolite repression. The creA gene of 32 allyl alcohol sensitive mutants was sequenced and 27 of them indeed contained a mutation in the creA gene. Targeted deletion of creA in the reporter strain confirmed that the loss of CreA results in constitutive expression from the faeB promoter. CONCLUSION: Loss of function of CreA leads to low but inducer-independent expression from the faeB promoter in A. niger. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10529-021-03104-2