Developmental skills between kindergarten children with handwriting difficulties in Chinese and/or English.

AIM: This study aimed to examine the differences in developmental skills between children with and without handwriting difficulties in their last year of kindergarten education. METHODS: Standardised tests on handwriting performance and developmental skills were administered to 20 typically developing children, 21 children with handwriting difficulties in Chinese and 23 children with handwriting difficulties in both Chinese and English. We used one-way MANOVA, univariate ANOVA and post hoc comparisons, to compare the developmental skills between children with and without handwriting difficulties. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify the significant predictors of developmental skills for Chinese and English handwriting performance. RESULTS: Higher proportion of children faced handwriting difficulties in Chinese than in English. Their major problem in Chinese handwriting was on stroke formation, while the results did not indicate the key factor leading to English handwriting difficulties. The results also showed that children with handwriting difficulties had significantly poorer visual motor integration, some aspects of visual perception and fine motor skills than typically developing children. Reading skills were not a key factor contributing to handwriting performance. In addition, visual and fine motor integration and spatial relationship were the significant predictors of Chinese and English handwriting performance, which accounted for 39.7 and 43.6% of the variance respectively. CONCLUSION: First, the results suggested that more resources should be devoted to coaching children to learn Chinese than English handwriting. Second, besides direct repetitive practice on handwriting, there is a need to incorporate learning activities to facilitate the development of visual motor skills, visual perception, and fine motor skills as a preparation for learning to write or in improving handwriting performance among kindergarten children.

Visual-perceptual-kinesthetic inputs on influencing writing performances in children with handwriting difficulties.

This study investigated the role of visual-perceptual input in writing Chinese characters among senior school-aged children who had handwriting difficulties (CHD). The participants were 27 CHD (9-11 years old) and 61 normally developed control. There were three writing conditions: copying, and dictations with or without visual feedback. The motor-free subtests of the Developmental Test of Visual Perception (DTVP-2) were conducted. The CHD group showed significantly slower mean speeds of character production and less legibility of produced characters than the control group in all writing conditions (ps<0.001). There were significant deteriorations in legibility from copying to dictation without visual feedback. Nevertheless, the Group by Condition interaction effect was not statistically significant. Only position in space of DTVP-2 was significantly correlated with the legibility among CHD (r=-0.62, p=0.001). Poor legibility seems to be related to the less-intact spatial representation of the characters in working memory, which can be rectified by viewing the characters during writing. Visual feedback regarding one's own actions in writing can also improve legibility of characters among these children.

Validation of the Chinese Handwriting Analysis System (CHAS) for primary school students in Hong Kong.

There are more children diagnosed with specific learning difficulties in recent years as people are more aware of these conditions. Diagnostic tool has been validated to screen out this condition from the population (SpLD test for Hong Kong children). However, for specific assessment on handwriting problem, there seems a lack of standardized and objective evaluation tool to look into the problems. The objective of this study was to validate the Chinese Handwriting Analysis System (CHAS), which is designed to measure both the process and production of handwriting. The construct validity, convergent validity, internal consistency and test-retest reliability of CHAS was analyzed using the data from 734 grade 1-6 students from 6 primary schools in Hong Kong. Principal Component Analysis revealed that measurements of CHAS loaded into 4 components which accounted for 77.73% of the variance. The correlation between the handwriting accuracy obtained from HAS and eyeballing was r=.73. Cronbach's alpha of all measurement items was .65. Except SD of writing time per character, all the measurement items regarding handwriting speed, handwriting accuracy and pen pressure showed good to excellent test-retest reliability (r=.72-.96), while measurement on the numbers of characters which exceeded grid showed moderate reliability (r=.48). Although there are still ergonomic, biomechanical or unspecified aspects which may not be determined by the system, the CHAS can definitely assist therapists in identifying primary school students with handwriting problems and implement interventions accordingly.