Effectiveness of Psychomotor Therapy among Children with Graphomotor Impairment with and without DCD-Diagnosis.

In Switzerland, psychomotor therapy (PMT) is a standard treatment for children with graphomotor impairments, but scientific evidence of its effectiveness is rare. To investigate the effectiveness of PMT, we conducted a randomised field trial (RFT). The sample consisted of 121 first and second graders with graphomotor impairments, some of whom met the criteria of developmental coordination disorder, while the remaining suffered from developmental dysgraphia. The treatments lasted over 5 months. Handwriting fluency and consistency were measured five times on a digitising tablet. All participating children completed a self-concept interview, and a standardised fine motor performance test twice. Psychomotor therapy significantly improved the fine motor skills of the therapy group compared to those of the waiting group. However, there was no evidence that the treated children improved more than the waiting children in terms of their graphomotor skills such as frequency, automaticity, and consistency of forming letters. Finally, the children of the therapy group showed partial improvements in their handwriting self-concept, while those of the waiting group children remained stable. This short-term RFT demonstrated the effectiveness of PMT in terms of fine motor skills and some aspects of the handwriting self-concept but showed no effects on handwriting fluency and consistency.

Impact of handwriting training on fluency, spelling and text quality among third graders.

As recent studies and theoretical assumptions suggest that the quality of texts composed by children and adolescents is affected by their transcription skills, this experimental field trial aims at investigating the impact of combined handwriting/spelling training on fluency, spelling and text quality among normally developing 3rd graders (N = 175). In addition to the combined handwriting/spelling training group, the sample includes two other intervention groups, a handwriting training group and a spelling training group as well as a reading fluency training control group. The participating teachers (N = 11) and their students were randomly assigned to the different intervention and control conditions, which were scheduled to last 20 units (each unit lasts 15 min) distributed over 5 weeks (4 units/week). Data collection was administered both before (pre-test) and after (post-test) the intervention as well as 3 months later (follow-up). Measures included group-administered tests and tasks (spelling, visuo-motor integration, copy task, and composing) and individually administered tests and tasks (working memory and several handwriting tasks on the digitizing tablet). As handwriting automaticity (measured on the digitizing tablet) was already high at the beginning of the study, the intervention was not able to improve it further. In consequence, an intervention effect on the quality of composed texts was not observed. Instead, text quality was predicted by working memory, fluency, spelling, and gender irrespective of the intervention.