Handwriting fluency and the quality of primary grade students’ writing

Abstract

Until children can produce letters quickly and accurately, it is assumed that handwriting disrupts and limits the quality of their text. This investigation is the largest study to date (2596 girls, 2354 boys) assessing the association between handwriting fluency and writing quality. We tested whether handwriting fluency made a statistically unique contribution to predicting primary grade students’ writing quality on a functional writing task, after variance due to attitude towards writing, students’ language background (L1, L2, bilingual), gender, grade, and nesting due to class and school were first controlled. Handwriting fluency accounted for a statistically significant 7.4% of the variance in the writing quality of primary grade students. In addition, attitude towards writing, language background, grade and gender each uniquely predicted writing quality. Finally, handwriting fluency increased from one grade to the next, girls had faster handwriting than boys, and gender differences increased across grades. An identical pattern of results were observed for writing quality. Directions for future research and writing practices are discussed.

Learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of emergency remote instruction on first grade students’ writing: A natural experiment.

“…Each trait was scored using a separate 1 to 5 rating scale. The rating scaled were developed and validated for use in Grades 1–3 by Skar, Jølle, and Aasen (2020), and also used in Skar et al (2021), who reported that, on average, girls outperformed boys, and students in higher grades outperformed students in lower grades. Higher scores represented better quality for the trait assessed.…”

Audience awareness in elementary school students’ texts

“…The aim of our study was to explore audience awareness characteristics in elementary school students' texts. Based on previous research into the same student group (Skar, Lei, et al, 2021), we expected to find considerable variation within and between grades. Therefore, we posed the following two research questions:…”

“…The corpus constituted a representative sub-sample of a large pool of texts (N = 6,058) that were written by students in grades 1-3 (aged 6-8 years) and were scored for text quality (see Skar, Lei, et al, 2021, for details on the scoring procedure and the representativeness of the larger sample; see Skar, Kvistad et al, 2021, for information on the scoring criteria). The corpus used in the present investigation was representative in terms of score groups.…”

“…All texts in the corpus were answers to the same writing task (presented in detail in Skar, Lei, et al, 2021). The writing task, which was administrated at the end of the academic year in the spring of 2019, instructed the students to write an answer to the researchers at the university in Trondheim, informing the researchers of what the students enjoyed doing during recess.…”

“…First, it would not add to the knowledge of what to expect from children, as the criteria themselves would have been based on such expectations. Second, the texts in the corpus already represented different score levels (Skar, Lei, et al, 2021), and using assessment criteria would have produced a circular argument: texts in the HS groups would have been shown to exhibit the characteristics listed in the criteria for high scores.…”