Updated Practical Overview of Children's Hand Skill Assessments

Assessing children's hand skill use is crucial for occupational therapy professional practice and research. Children's hand skill assessments could assist therapists in determining whether any presenting hand skill problems are impacting children's occupational performance or daily life participation. As well, it could assist with analyzing and establishing hand skill profile for conducting further assessments, planning intervention, and/or monitoring change. In this article, the authors provide an up-to-date overview of children's hand skill assessments by reviewing recent literature and assessments related to children's hand skills. The overview includes review of common hand use terminologies, administration modes, and recent conceptual trend for children's hand skill assessments. Furthermore, a newly-developed Assessment of Children's Hand Skills (ACHS) is briefly introduced. The ACHS fulfills the recent trend toward including bimanual measurement, reflecting actual real-life hand skill performance, and being occupation-centered. The ACHS also allows assessing the effectiveness of 2- to 12-year-old children's hand skill performance in relevant daily environments via naturalistic observation. It is anticipated that occupational therapists could use this information to select proper children's hand skill assessments.