Acquisitional Frame of Reference

Frame of Reference for Motor Skill Acquisition

Acquiring motor skill is a process that requires practices, feedback, and involvement of the learner. This frame of reference employs several principles from learning theory. It focuses on the child’s ability, characteristics of the task, skills required, environment, and regulatory conditions. Regulatory conditions are aspects of the environment that determine movement specifics, which are described in a continuum between closed and open tasks.

This frame of reference adapts a top-down approach to identify visual perceptual factors that limit an individual’s daily participation, and adaptive and compensation approaches are used to facilitate engagement in meaningful occupation. It uses theories from cognition, developmental psychology, education, and Warren’s developmental hierarchy of visual perceptual skills. Visual Perceptual skill development is viewed to be developed from a hierarchy, starting from oculomotor control, visual fields, visual acuity.

This framework aims to guide clinical reasoning with respect to describing, analyzing, and selecting a potential strategy for a client’s unique performance problem. It identifies seven general attributes that can be used to describe and organize cognitive strategies. They are:

The four-quadrant model of facilitated learning (4QM) is used by teachers and practitioners in selecting effective learning strategies based on changing needs of the learners during acquisition of new skills. When occupational therapists use skill acquisition as intervention strategy, the 4QM provides a way of understanding, planning, and organizing the use of learning strategies. Through acquiring occupational performance components, the goal is for improve performance in the targeted occupation.