The Assessment of Motor and Process Skills (AMPS)

The AMPS is an innovative observational assessment used to measure how well a client performs familiar activities of daily living (ADL).

The quality of occupational performance is evaluated by
rating the effort, efficiency, safety and independence of 16 motor skills and 20 process skills, while the person is doing chosen, familiar and life relevant ADL tasks.

There are
over 125 ADL tasks in the AMPS, from very easy self-care tasks to multi-step domestic tasks (including outdoor tasks and shopping).

The AMPS is a tool that:

Supports occupation-centred practice

Requiring the ADL tasks that the person performs for the assessment to be selected by the person and can therefore be meaningful and relevant to them

Is powerful and sensitive

Assists with intervention planning and outcome measures, providing evidence that a client's occupational performance has changed

Generates ADL measures that can be used collaboratively with clients

These can be used to plan occupation-based and occupation-focussed goals, writing occupation-focussed documentation

Is flexible and timely

Requires no special equipment and can be administered in any relevant setting within 30-40 minutes

Enables a therapist to dermine the ADL ability of the person

The measurement model also takes into account the relative challenge of each ADL task so that people performing different ADL tasks can be direclty compared.

Can be administered on anybody aged 2+

As a result, a person’s ADL ability measures are not biased by the rater who observed the performance

Is standardised

Both internationally and cross-culturally on more than 100,000 subjects

Training Workshops

This provides occupational therapists and occupational therapy students critical information related to the theoretical basis of the AMPS as well as experiential learning of administering and scoring the AMPS. 

Access upcoming courses

Other important AMPS information

Participation in the training workshops and successful completion of the calibration process is required to use the AMPS

For those completing courses in-person, rater calibration involves each potential rater completing 10 AMPS assessments after the course and submitting the data for analysis within 3 months. This is to demonstrate that their scoring is valid and reliable

For those completing courses online, calibration is an integral part of this course. There is no requirement to complete additional AMPS assessments to become calibrated


AMPS computer-scoring software is only available to people who successfully complete the AMPS training and calibration process


The AMPS is unsuitable to assess children under 2 years old or people unwilling to participate in simple daily life tasks