Development of Handwriting in Primary School: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

To investigate the development of handwriting in primary school children a study was conducted in which the scripts of 127 pupils were rated yearly, starting in Grade 2. Children were followed-up on for 3, 4, or 5 yr. The BHK-scale for children's handwriting was used for rating the scripts on 13 characteristics and for measuring the speed of writing. The shifts in frequency of occurrence of the various characteristics over time were analyzed using Correspondence Analysis. A one-dimensional solution was chosen, yielding a time dimension. Results were interpreted in terms of (a) children's growing motor ability, (b) a deterioration of the form aspects of the script as they had initially learned those, and (c) the development of a personal writing style with regard to esthetic aspects. A strong relation was found between the speed of writing and grade.

Speech movements do not scale by orofacial structure size

“…As in handwriting (8), the size of the effectors does not seem to have a significant effect on the amplitude of oral movement for speech. It could be speculated that there is an acoustic advantage for a relatively large oral opening for young children.…”

“…Therefore, children learning to produce speech and to write are less able to precisely control their motor output. This lack of precise control of movement coordination may explain why relatively large hand movements are seen in children learning to write (8) and relatively large movements of the orofacial structures are observed in children during speech production. The nonfluent writing strategy of young children is also partly attributed to a closed-loop strategy, such that sensory feedback (i.e., visual guidance) is needed to produce and correct the movements (8).…”

“…The results of this experiment clearly suggest that speech movement amplitude does not follow a sizescaling principle and that speech motor control is, therefore, more similar to handwriting than to locomotion (2,8,18). We examined this issue by using both between-group and within-group analyses.…”

“…Conversely, handwriting does not show a size-scaling principle in development. In fact, an investigation examining the development of the control of handwriting in a large number of children revealed that movement amplitude decreased with maturation (8). These results indicate that maturation of underlying neural processes may have a greater effect on kinematic parameters of handwriting and other fine motor behaviors (19) than biomechanical factors.…”

“…Studies of the control of motor behaviors such as locomotion, handwriting, and speech often reveal developmental trends of decreasing variability in both temporal and spatial parameters of movement and increasing velocity of movement with maturation (6,8,9,14,16,18,20,23,24,27,29,31). The development of locomotion is also characterized by a physical scaling principle evidenced by a linear increase in step length as limb length increases (2,18,29,30,33).…”