Unlocking deeper insights: A guide to the new scores available with BOT-3
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For years, the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency™ (BOT™) has been known and trusted for comprehensive evaluation of gross and fine motor skills across a wide range of ages and ability levels.
But did you know that the latest edition—the BOT™-3—builds on that strong foundation with several brand-new scores that give clinicians even more clinically meaningful information to work with?
In this post, we'll break down each of these new scores, explain what they measure, and highlight how they can enhance your assessment and intervention planning.
Why introduce new scores?
Subtest and composite scores are useful to obtain a baseline and help qualify an individual for services, but it can be hard to relate them to everyday life activities, and they cannot always detect progress, particularly in individuals with significant delays.
The BOT-3 introduces three new supplemental scores designed to help answer clinical questions about what underlying difficulties might be impacting motor performance in daily life.
Additionally, new growth scale values (GSVs) allow you to track progress in a meaningful way, by scientifically comparing an individual's performance against their own previous results rather than just a normative sample.
Neither the supplemental scores nor the GSVs require any additional test administration time—they simply offer new ways of looking at your existing data set.
Let's take a closer look at each score.
1. Skilled Manual Performance: A true measure of fine motor ability
Subtests included: Fine Motor Precision, Fine Motor Integration, and Manual Dexterity
This composite score brings together the results of three subtests to create what you might think of as a ‘pure’ measure of fine motor performance.
By combining Fine Motor Precision, Fine Motor Integration, and Manual Dexterity into a single norm-referenced score, the Skilled Manual Performance score gives you a clear, comprehensive picture of fine motor development.
If you mainly use the BOT-3 for fine motor concerns, this score is for you!
How can you use it?
- Strengthening eligibility determinations with a robust, focused fine motor score
- Informing and supporting fine motor intervention recommendations
- Only administer the subtests you need—no need to use the Upper Limb Coordination subtest to obtain a composite
2. Planning and Coordination: A measure of praxis
Items included: Select items from Fine Motor Precision, Manual Dexterity, Upper-Limb Coordination, Bilateral Coordination, Balance, Strength, and Dynamic Movement (15 items in total).
Motor planning and sequencing are often at the heart of what makes everyday tasks challenging for many individuals. Every edition of the BOT has included items measuring planning and coordination, but having these items spread across several subtests made it complex to identify specific challenges in this area.
The Planning and Coordination score helps capture and quantify these difficulties. Using fifteen selected items from across the full BOT-3 battery, this score reflects the extent to which an individual can plan, sequence, and integrate movements on both sides of their body. Items were chosen because they demonstrated high discrimination between individuals with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) and typically developing peers—making the Planning and Coordination score a powerful tool for this population as well as other overlapping diagnoses such as autism and ADHD.
How can you use it?
- Assessing individuals with known or suspected DCD, autism, or ADHD
- Identifying motor planning and bilateral integration challenges that may not be fully captured by other scores
- Supporting diagnostic conversations and intervention planning for clients who struggle with coordinated, sequenced movement
Whether you're an OT or PT working with school-age children or young adults, this score adds a meaningful layer of clinical insight.
3. Movement Fundamentals Score: Measuring the 'building blocks' of complex movement
Items included: Select items from Upper-Limb Coordination, Bilateral Coordination, Balance, Strength, and Dynamic Movement (13 items total).
The Movement Fundamentals Score takes a different approach from the other two supplemental scores. Rather than comparing an individual to a normative sample, this criterion-referenced score tracks acquisition of foundational movement skills that we know are essential building blocks for more complex motor patterns.
Basic locomotion, balance, and object control skills are recognized prerequisites for the motor patterns needed during play, sports, and activities of daily life. Comprising scores from thirteen BOT-3 items, the Movement Fundamentals Score gives you a reliable measure of where an individual stands on their journey toward physical literacy.
How can you use it?
- Monitoring younger children's progress over time toward foundational movement milestones
- Tracking the effectiveness of early intervention programs
- Goal setting and monitoring of motor skill acquisition in older children with significant motor delays
- Communicating progress to families and educational teams in a meaningful, accessible way
- Supporting adaptive physical education teachers in program planning
Because it's criterion-referenced, this score is especially well-suited for progress monitoring—allowing you to document growth relative to established benchmarks rather than simply comparing an individual to others in their age group.
4. Growth Scale Values (GSVs): Measuring intra-individual progress
One of the most exciting new features of the BOT-3 is the inclusion of Growth Scale Values (GSVs)—a special type of score that allows you to tell the full story of an individual's motor development journey.
Unlike standard scores, which compare an individual to their same-age peers, GSVs compare the individual's performance to their own prior performance. This means that even if norm-referenced scores remain unchanged or even decrease, GSVs can still reveal genuine progress and provide powerful evidence of intervention effectiveness.
This is a gamechanger. Particularly when working with individuals who have significant challenges who may never 'catch up' to their typical peers.
Make confident clinical decisions with BOT-3
The addition of GSVs and the Skilled Manual Performance, Planning and Coordination, and Movement Fundamentals scores provides BOT-3 users with even more useful data to guide their clinical decisions.
As always, the best assessments are the ones that help you gather data to effect meaningful change in a client's life. The BOT-3's new scores are a significant step in that direction, so now you know they exist—we hope you'll make good use of them!