Temporal measures of poor and proficient handwriters

The objective of this study was to use quantitative outcome measures of children’s handwriting to examine differences in the temporal characteristics of proficient and poor handwriters. This was accomplished by using an x-y digitizer to sample the handwriting of 100 third grade children as they performed a series of functional tasks of varying length and complexity. A major finding was that the poor handwriters performed significantly worse on all of the tested temporal variables than did their peers. Moreover, all the children, and especially the poor handwriters, did not maintain contact with the writing surface for large percentages of the total writing time. The educational implications of these results are discussed.

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