Motor competence as an indicator of gross motor development is characterized by changes in movement patterns and outcomes. The Test of Gross Motor Development-3 consists of six locomotor and seven ball tasks used to assess the quality of fundamental motor skills in children. The purpose of this study is twofold—to produce a Slovenian translation of Test of Gross Motor Development-3 and to evaluate it on a sample of Slovenian children. First, a back translation was carried out with the help of relevant field professionals, thus producing a Slovenian version of Test of Gross Motor Development-3 with excellent content validity. Second, trained assessors rated the video-recorded test tasks of 452 Slovenian children with smaller groups of measured participants repeating the procedure within 2- and 4-week interval to assess reliability. Finally, the collected data were analyzed using several statistical methods. The data showed good to excellent reliability for intrarater, interrater, test–retest reliability, structural validity, and internal consistency for the majority of motor skills, as well as good measurement invariance across genders.

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This cross-sectional study was designed to identify Slovenian early childhood educators’ beliefs concerning the importance of the competencies required to carry out physical education (PE), to identify which of those competencies early childhood educators might lack and to identify which competencies should be developed in the process of continuous professional development. For this purpose, a self-administered questionnaire was designed to examine belief statements regarding a wide scope of PE competencies among 183 early childhood educators. The participants evaluated the importance of individual competencies and reported their current and desired levels of competencies using a four-level scale. The results showed that early childhood educators believe that competencies to teach PE are an important part of early childhood education and that they need to improve in such competencies to carry out PE above the existing level. In particular, early childhood educators would like to improve in knowledge, skills and abilities that will enable them to implement PE efficiently and effectively to change children’s health-related behaviours. We suggest that the gap between the self-reported beliefs about the current level of PE competencies and the desired level of PE competencies is vital for policy-makers, who aim to create unitary early childhood education and care systems in which similar qualifications and competencies among early childhood educators are needed. It seems that a lack of policy, curriculum development and educators’ expertise in PE contributes to the considerable variation in the understanding of the educational role of early childhood educators within PE.

Existing research provides ambiguous evidence for associations between motor competency and motor creativity. Therefore, this study examined the association between motor skill proficiency and motor creativity. The Test of Gross Motor Development (second edition) and Bertsch's motor creativity test were used to assess motor skill proficiency and motor creativity among 39 children aged five to six. Results revealed that motor proficiency and motor creativity are not interrelated traits. Therefore, it is necessary to use different teaching strategies to promote these traits. Teaching with direct instructions and reproduction of demonstrated movement is probably the most appropriate to acquaint children with motor skills. Learning through play with less explicit teaching instructions and emphasis on motivating children to find novel and original solutions to the motor tasks is probably more suitable for facilitating motor creativity.

The influence of different motor practice types on lateral asymmetry of performance was investigated in 40 preschool children. Lateral preference was measured prior the experiment. For the purpose of present study dribbling a ball with a hand and foot was used to assess lateral asymmetry of performance before and after three different motor practice types. Motor practice with the non-dominant, dominant, and both (contralateral) limbs took place in the indoor facility 4 times/week for 6 weeks. Each session lasted 30–40 min. Our results showed that unilateral practice of dribbling is more beneficial for diminishing lateral asymmetry of performance in comparison to bilateral practice. Moreover, participants who practiced with their dominant limb diminished lateral asymmetry of performance the most and made the largest overall improvement. We did not find important differences between acquisitions of dribbling with upper- and lower-extremity. In this sense, the results support the notion of lateral asymmetry of performance to be task-specific.