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Pyramid of learning, a concrete example: what to observe at each level in children and athletes, WHO benchmarks, biases to avoid and when to refer.
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Observing the pyramid of learning means starting from what you see at the top (a failed movement, an instruction that doesn't land) to form a hypothesis about the level that costs, then checking it with a test, a stimulation and a retest repeated over several days. This reading guides the movement professional; the assessment remains the business of health professionals.
Hello to you, the movement professional,
10 a.m., the bell rings and the playground fills up. From the edge, three children in their last year of preschool catch your eye. The first crosses the playground at a run, brushes past the posts, bumps into a classmate and takes off again without slowing down. The second stops at the foot of the climbing structure, fingers clenched around the post, and climbs back down as soon as someone makes the walkway shake. The third wants to play with the ball; when it is passed to him, his head stays frozen, his arms reach out late and the ball bounces off his stomach.
The urge to stick a level on them comes right away: sensory for the one who charges ahead, hand-eye coordination for the one who misses the ball. Each label can fall the moment you learn that the first slept six hours. The second was born in December, almost a year after some of the children in his class, and nobody knows whether the third has ever had a ball in his hands. Replace the playground with the warm-up of an under-15 team, and the scene still holds.
In the field, you read the pyramid from top to bottom, looking under the summit for what makes it so costly. You note a behavior in factual words, "catches two balls out of ten thrown from three meters" rather than "clumsy." You draw from it a hypothesis that points to a level, never to the name of a difficulty recognized by medicine. What remains is to check it, changing a single condition at a time.
Each level has its in-depth article: the sensory foundation of the pyramid, sensorimotor development and its six skills, perceptual-motor development at level 4. Here, we stay at the edge of the field.
Start by measuring how much ordinary children differ from one another. The World Health Organization's study on motor development followed 816 children in Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the United States. Its windows of achievement run from the 1st to the 99th percentile: sitting without support arrives between 3.8 and 9.2 months, walking alone between 8.2 and 17.6 months. And 4.3% of the children followed never crawled on all fours.
More than nine months of spread for walking, in healthy children: enough to calm a good many comparisons between neighbors.
For what comes next, the grid from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was revised in 2022 with the American Academy of Pediatrics. It keeps only milestones that at least 75% of children have reached at the stated age. At 18 months, the child walks without holding on; at 2 years, he runs and kicks a ball; at 30 months, he jumps with both feet leaving the ground. At 4 years, he catches a large ball most of the time and holds a pencil between fingers and thumb. At 5 years, he hops on one foot. These milestones serve medical surveillance; for you, they tell you when a gap deserves to be flagged to the parents.
In France, the child health record (carnet de santé) in force since January 1, 2025 also includes, in its mandatory medical examinations, grids for spotting signs of unusual development.
The playground and the motor skills room are your best observation posts: the child moves there without knowing he is being watched.
Level | What you can see at recess or in session | Hypothesis to formulate | What you can check within your role |
|---|---|---|---|
1. Central nervous system | A child who is agitated or switched off from the moment he arrives, very different from one day to the next | Arousal level of the moment, the night's sleep | The time of day, compared over several days |
2. Sensory systems | He avoids the swing and the merry-go-round, stiffens when brushed in line, or keeps seeking to spin and bump into things | Sensory information perceived too strongly or too weakly | The same stimulation in small doses, noting whether he accepts it a little better from one session to the next |
3. Sensorimotor development | He succeeds at a familiar course and gets lost as soon as the order is changed; he falls without putting his hands out; he switches hands to avoid crossing the midline of the body | Motor planning, postural security, awareness of both sides | The course with a single unfamiliar variation; objects to pick up on either side of the body |
4. Perceptual-motor development | He turns his whole head to follow the ball, blocks it against his stomach, loses his place in the circle | Oculomotor control, hand-eye coordination, spatial orientation | A bigger, slower ball, then the usual ball |
5. Cognition and intellect | He follows a one-step instruction, gets lost in a three-step one; he takes a very long time to get dressed to go out | Cost of the levels below, or simple comprehension | The same instruction shown then spoken, one step at a time then chained |
The middle column stays in the conditional until the last one has confirmed anything. Take the child who switches hands mid-drawing to avoid the midline of the body. Crossing the midline is built with age; before seeing a fragile level in it, check whether he also avoids it in free play, and redo the observation the following week.
In the athlete, the summit is called technique and decision. The levels below give themselves away when the session changes its constraint.
Moment of the session | What you notice | Suggested level | What can skew your reading |
|---|---|---|---|
Passes on the move | The movement degrades as soon as the head turns to follow the ball | 4 (gaze) and 2 (vestibular) | Cold pitch, new ball, low-angle lighting |
New exercise | Learned quickly in a fixed version, lost at the first change of detail | 3 (motor planning) | Instruction misunderstood, exercise already practiced elsewhere |
Single-leg support, changes of direction | Clear gap between right leg and left leg | 3 (body schema, two sides of the body) | Shoes, slippery floor, dominant side trained for years |
Fast opposition | Instruction understood at the board, forgotten as soon as the game speeds up | 5, carried by level 4 | Stakes of the moment, opponent's level |
End of session | Technique goes while power still holds | 1 (arousal) | Short night, previous day's load, exam week |
The last column weighs as much as the others. Technique that collapses at the end of a session can come from a fragile level just as much as from muscle fatigue that blurs the sensors. And a successful exercise can hide weak signals of poor learning.
In the young athlete, maturation muddies the scene further. Catherine Quatman-Yates and colleagues (2012) reviewed 33 studies. Their conclusion: many aspects of sensorimotor control are still maturing during adolescence, and some young people go through delays or setbacks. The authors also stress the gaps in the data.
Relative age complicates the reading further. The meta-analysis by Stephen Cobley and colleagues (2009) covers 38 studies across 14 sports. The effect is consistent but modest, and the risk is highest in boys aged 15 to 18 selected at regional or national level, in very popular sports. The "clumsy" player in your category is sometimes the youngest, or the least mature.
Your reading stops where that of the doctor, the occupational therapist or the psychomotor therapist begins. The CDC advises acting early when a child doesn't reach one or more milestones, when he loses skills he had acquired, or when a parent is worried. For the 2022 working group, a milestone not reached justifies considering screening.
Beyond these milestones, simple caution invites referral as soon as a difficulty weighs on the child's life at school, at the table or with others. Same for repeated falls that injure him, or for a clear gap between his two sides that persists from one week to the next. Fatigue that overtakes him much faster than children his age also justifies talking to the parents. In the athlete, any blow to the head is a matter for the doctor, without waiting.
Referring means describing to the parents what you saw and suggesting they talk to the doctor who follows the child. You name nothing. The boundary with the psychomotor therapist's work is detailed in the sheet on the difference between RNP and psychomotor therapy.
A child who falls tells you almost nothing. Filmed in free play, children aged 12 to 19 months take on average 2,368 steps and fall 17 times per hour (Adolph et al., 2012). Only a difficulty that comes back, under the same conditions and over several days, becomes information.
Fatigue, context (unfamiliar gym, new adult, peers' gaze), relative age and familiarity with the task change the scene faster than a fragile level does. In children, we therefore spread the reading over two to three sessions before keeping a hypothesis.
The test, stimulation, retest logic gives this caution a form. You test a measurable milestone under noted conditions, you offer a stimulation targeted at the presumed level, then you redo exactly the same test. Its adaptation for children keeps a brief test and a spaced-out retest, to respect their fatigability.
The retest has its own trap. Will Hopkins (2000) points out that between two trials, the mean of a measure also moves under the effect of learning, motivation or fatigue. A better retest can reflect a second trial that was better understood. Only progress that is found again the following week counts, which ties in with the distinction between learning and immediate performance.
The two tables in this article are field reading grids, built to ask better questions. Nobody has validated them as assessment tools, nor measured their inter-observer reliability.
The pyramid remains a practitioners' diagram whose strict order has not been demonstrated. The WHO and CDC milestones, though solid, were designed for medical surveillance. And in children with coordination difficulties, the meta-analysis by Bouwien Smits-Engelsman and colleagues (2013) finds more effect from working on the task itself than from working only on the supposed functions underneath.
If your search for "pyramid of learning example" sends you to memorization percentages, you have landed on Dale's pyramid and its percentages, which says nothing about movement.
Choose a single child or a single athlete who raises questions for you. Observe him on three different days and note two or three factual sentences each time, without adjectives.
At the third visit, attach a single hypothesis to a level of Taylor and Trott's pyramid and build a simple comparison: slow ball then normal, head fixed then moving. The real task stays at the heart of the session, the targeted stimulation comes alongside, and the retest is done the following week under the same conditions.
If the retest improves and holds, your hypothesis gains weight. If it doesn't move, the fragile level lies elsewhere, or nowhere. And if a signal from the referral section appears along the way, you hand over. Reading where the system drops out before loading the summit is what we teach in Neuro-Postural Reprogramming.
Your eye spots the level that is stuck. It is the retest, repeated over several days, that entitles you to believe it.
👉 I want to intervene in the right place.
Start from a scene at the summit, for example a child who blocks the ball against his stomach. Formulate a hypothesis about the level, here perceptual-motor, then compare a big, slow ball with the usual ball. Redo the observation over several days before keeping the hypothesis.
According to the World Health Organization study (2006), walking alone appears between 8.2 and 17.6 months in healthy children. The CDC's revised grid (2022) sets walking without support at 18 months, an age at which at least 75% of children manage it.
The CDC cites three: one or more milestones not reached, loss of skills already acquired, a parent's worry. The movement professional then describes what he observed and invites the parents to talk to the doctor who follows the child.
At least two to three observations, on different days: an isolated session mixes fatigue, context and novelty of the task. Progress on the retest only counts if it is found again the following week.
Within the same category, nearly a year can separate two players. The meta-analysis by Cobley and colleagues (2009) finds a consistent relative age effect in sport, modest on average, more marked in boys aged 15 to 18 selected at regional or national level. The least coordinated in the group is sometimes the youngest.
Describe precise facts, without a label or a prognosis, and suggest talking to the doctor who follows the child, who can refer to an occupational therapist or a psychomotor therapist. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is added as a complement to a care pathway, never in its place.
WHO Multicentre Growth Reference Study Group (2006). WHO Motor Development Study: windows of achievement for six gross motor development milestones. Acta Paediatrica, 95(S450), 86-95.
Zubler J.M. et al. (2022). Evidence-informed milestones for developmental surveillance tools. Pediatrics, 149(3), e2021052138.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC's Developmental Milestones. Learn the Signs. Act Early. https://www.cdc.gov/act-early/milestones/index.html, accessed October 29, 2026.
Sante.fr, public health information service. Le carnet de santé de l'enfant. https://www.sante.fr/le-carnet-de-sante-de-lenfant-1, accessed October 29, 2026.
Adolph K.E. et al. (2012). How do you learn to walk? Thousands of steps and dozens of falls per day. Psychological Science, 23(11), 1387-1394.
Quatman-Yates C.C. et al. (2012). A systematic review of sensorimotor function during adolescence: a developmental stage of increased motor awkwardness? British Journal of Sports Medicine, 46(9), 649-655.
Cobley S., Baker J., Wattie N., McKenna J. (2009). Annual age-grouping and athlete development: a meta-analytical review of relative age effects in sport. Sports Medicine, 39(3), 235-256.
Hopkins W.G. (2000). Measures of reliability in sports medicine and science. Sports Medicine, 30(1), 1-15.
Smits-Engelsman B.C.M. et al. (2013). Efficacy of interventions to improve motor performance in children with developmental coordination disorder: a combined systematic review and meta-analysis. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 55(3), 229-237.
Taylor K., Trott M. (1991). Pyramid of Learning, diagram reproduced in Williams M.S., Shellenberger S. (1996). How Does Your Engine Run? A Leader's Guide to the Alert Program for Self-Regulation. Albuquerque: TherapyWorks.
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