# DEVELOPMENT OF A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION FOR GERONTOLOGY

> **NIH NIH R01** · COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY · 1993 · $208,319

## Abstract

This project will result in the standardization of an assessment of
functional skills of older persons that will be used by occupational
therapists for more accurate (a) determination of capacity for
independent living, (b) identification of individuals at-risk for
functional decline, and (c) selection of appropriate and cost-effective
interventions. This psychometrically-sound and innovative evaluation tool,
the Assessment of Motor and Process Skills (AMPS), provides an ecological
appraisal of motor and process (cognitive) skills as they are used during
the actual performance of a familiar, chosen, and relevant daily life
task.

A total of 30 tasks, 15 motor skill items, and 20 process skill items will
be calibrated on a stratified sample of 200 younger well adults and 700
older adults selected to represent the well to frail elderly continuum,
and with equal representation for gender, race (black/white), and
diagnostic subgroup (well elderly, frail elderly, stroke, dementia, and
hip fracture). In addition to careful examination of reliability and
concurrent validity, the utility of the AMPS as a measure of change, and
as a predictor of ability across tasks of greater or lesser difficulty and
between home and clinical settings will be examined.

The AMPS skill items are conceptualized as universal taxonomies of the
motor and process operations that are necessary for skilled task
performance. Evaluation of these operations represents a level of task
analysis that is between typical approaches that evaluate discrete
underlying constituents (e.g., strength or mental status evaluations), and
those that evaluate global task performance (e.g., ADL/IADL indexes). The
ability to simultaneously assess component motor and process skills as the
person actually performs a daily living task links discrete and global
methods in a manner that permits direct measurement of the impact of motor
and process skill deficits on independent daily life task performance.

The use of recently developed many-faceted Rasch analysis methods will
lead to measures that adjust person scores to account for the severity of
the rater and the difficulty of the tasks the person chooses to perform.
Further, the use of many-faceted Rasch analysis will lead to the
definition of a hierarchy of task and skill item difficulties, along a
common linear continuum (scale), that can be used to compare and predict
performance across tasks that are harder, or easier, than those the person
actually performed. Knowledge of where along this conceptual ability
continuum of skill items the person experiences difficulty, combined with
the ability to estimate the point at which the person will encounter
difficulty on an easier or more challenging task, will provide precise and
critical information that is needed to plan and measure the efficacy of
intervention programs. Finally, the assessment will be designed such that
individuals of varying ability levels and from different subgroups
(gender, racial/...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 3123951
- **Project number:** 1R01AG012345-01
- **Recipient organization:** COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY
- **SAM.gov UEI:** LT9CXX8L19G1
- **Principal Investigator:** ANNE G FISHER
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1993
- **Award amount:** $208,319
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 1993-09-30 → 1997-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/3123951

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 3123951, DEVELOPMENT OF A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION FOR GERONTOLOGY (1R01AG012345-01). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/3123951. Licensed CC0.

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