Developing Cerebral Palsy Screening of Functional Abilities in School (CPS –FAS)

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to determine the psychometric property of a newly developed functional abilities screening tool for children with cerebral palsy (CP) in special education units. Materials and Methods: This study was designed as a cross-sectional study. The tool for cerebral palsy screening of functional abilities in school (CPS-FAS) was established by surveying 28 pediatric physical therapists and holding focus group discussions with them. The CPS-FAS tool was used to evaluate content validity, reliability, and discriminative ability with 30 school-age children with CP at levels 1-3 of the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS). Results: The CPS-FAS generation process established 21 activity-problem screening items for children with CP, which had good content validity (index of item-objective congruence (IOC) = 1), good internal consistency (α = 0.92), and showed significant differences between GMFCS levels 1 and 3 (p > 0.001) and GMFCS levels 2 and 3 (p > 0.001). Conclusion: The CPS-FAS tool can be applied to school-age children with CP in a special education unit to screen such children for activity problems that affect school living without environmental obstruction and language barriers, and it only takes a short time (10-15 minutes) to complete.

Keywords

• Cerebral palsy
• Functional ability
• Special education school