Thinking Outside the Box and Exploring the Infinity Within the Box: Suggestions for Advancing Holistic Development Research With Movement at Its Core

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Abstract
In this commentary derived from the authors’ keynote at the sixth International Motor Development Research Consortium conference, we propose to go beyond pointing to direct indications in published papers that provide next steps needed to move a field forward, and suggest to recognize the importance of what literature does not directly speak to. We propose to collectively synthesize and integrate research from various lines of inquiry as an indirect way to conceptualize a “next big idea” in our field, broadening and deepening the view on existing knowledge (i.e., speaks to the “infinity within the box”). The focus is on the need to approach the scientific literature on motor development and learning with a historical view to learn from the past what may come next. We derive lessons that point to the importance of motor development to other critical outcome domains and to the need for a broader and more differentiated scope of classification of motor skills, as well as a more ecological and holistic understanding of motor competence and motor-cognitive performance assessment. We conclude by calling for the creation of a large-scale, cross-country data repository to amalgamate the disparate data from the various historical assessments of motor development, also coupled with other developmental outcome domains.

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