Difficulties may present as clumsiness, slowness and inaccuracy of performance of motor skills (e.g., catching objects, using cutlery, handwriting, riding a bike, use of tools or participating in team sports or swimming).

[citation needed] A diagnosis of DCD is reached only in the absence of other neurological impairments such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson's disease.

Occupational therapy can help people with dyspraxia to develop their coordination and achieve things that they might otherwise find extremely challenging to accomplish.

Coordinated motor skills are substantially below that expected given the individual's chronological age and level of intellectual functioning.

Onset of coordinated motor skills difficulties occurs during the developmental period and is typically apparent from early childhood.

[7] Evidence from research and clinical practice indicates that DCD is not just a physical disorder, and there may be deficits in executive functions, behavioural organisation and emotional regulation that extend beyond the motor impairments and which are independent of diagnoses of co-morbidities.

Whilst most of the general population experience these problems to some extent, they have a much more significant impact on the lives of dyspraxic people.

[10] Many dyspraxic people benefit from working in a structured environment, as repeating the same routine minimises difficulty with time-management and allows them to commit procedures to long-term memory.

[11] Whole body movement and motor coordination issues mean that major developmental targets including walking, running, climbing and jumping can be affected.

The difficulties vary from person to person and can include the following: Fine-motor problems can cause difficulty with a wide variety of other tasks such as using a knife and fork, fastening buttons and shoelaces, cooking, brushing teeth, styling hair, shaving,[11][15] applying cosmetics, opening jars and packets, locking and unlocking doors, and doing housework.

[33][34][35] Sensory processing disorder (SPD) concerns having oversensitivity or undersensitivity to physical stimuli, such as touch, light, sound, and smell.

[36] This may manifest itself as an inability to tolerate certain textures such as sandpaper or certain fabrics such as wool, oral intolerance of excessively textured food (commonly known as picky eating), being touched by another individual (in the case of touch oversensitivity) or it may require the consistent use of sunglasses outdoors since sunlight may be intense enough to cause discomfort to a dyspraxic person (in the case of light oversensitivity).

Undersensitivity to stimuli may also cause problems, as individuals do not receive the sensory input they need to understand where their bodies are in space.

This means that, for students with developmental coordination disorder, their working memory abilities determine their learning difficulties.

[citation needed] The American Psychiatric Association has four primary inclusive diagnostic criteria[45] for determining if a child has developmental coordination disorder.

However, research in the British Journal of Special Education has shown that knowledge is severely limited in many who should be trained to recognise and respond to various difficulties, including developmental coordination disorder, dyslexia and deficits in attention, motor control and perception (DAMP).

"[60]A diagnosis of DCD is reached only in the absence of other neurological impairments such as cerebral palsy,[61][44] multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson's disease.

[66] A review completed in 2017 by Cochrane of task-oriented interventions for DCD resulted in inconsistent findings and a call for further research and randomized controlled trials.