A study of handwriting production: educational and developmental aspects (original) (raw)

Chapter 1 Introduction Setting the framework of the study 11 Chapter 2 The production of line drawings Foreperiod duration and the analysis of motor stages in a line-drawing task 31 Chapter 3 The production of stroke sequences Movement analysis of repetitive writing behaviour of first, second and third-grade primary-school children 51 Chapter 4 The production of letter forms Perceptual-motor complexity of printed and cursive letters 77 The acquisition of skilled handwriting: Discontinuous trends in kinematic variables 93 Chapter 5 The production ofbigrams The production of connecting strokes in cursive writing: Developing co-articulation in 8 to 12 year-old children 105 Chapter 6 The production of words Variations in cursive-handwriting performance as a function of handedness, hand posture, and gender Chapter 7 Epilogue Applications of handwriting research to the organization and contents of handwriting curricula Collected references Summary Samenvatting Curriculum vitae 183 primary-school children producing simple stroke sequences, single cursive letter forms and cursive bigrams. The order of these tasks corresponds closely to the order in which children are taught the skill of cursive handwriting. The nature of our successive research questions changes correspondingly. At the start they are predominantly concerned with peripheral aspects of handwriting. Subsequently they increasingly pertain to 14 Chapter 1 empirical findings in the literature concerning the development of grasping and reaching. The series ends with a final laboratory study focussing on the written production of words by adults. The experiment was designed to investigate variations in handwriting performance as a function of the important subject variables of handedness, hand posture, and gender. Writing with the left hand is a specific matter of concern for teachers and educationalists. We argued that left-handed writing may well be studied in adult subjects because these subjects, having years of writing experience subsequent to their formal writing education, may be expected to have developed consistent, more or less efficient movement strategies. An analysis of these strategies should yield useful insights for the design of training situations for left-handed children. The thesis is concluded with a chapter which consists of an epilogue discussing the application of fundamental insights in handwriting to the field of education. The implications of a recent theoretical model of handwriting production (Van Galen, Meulenbroek & Hylkema 1986; Van Galen, Smyth, Meulenbroek & Hylkema, in press) for the organization and the content of a handwriting curriculum are discussed. Subsequently, an attempt is made to exploit the empirical findings of the present series of experiments, as well as the research technique with which their data were collected and analyzed, in the applied settings of formal writing education and the treatment of writing problems. Having described the global organization of the thesis we are now able to indicate how the present experiments differ from the educationally oriented studies of handwriting mentioned previously. In the present experiments we make use of sophisticated computer techniques to record and analyze both the spatial and kinematic aspects of handwriting movements with great precision, whereas the earlier studies were generally aimed at the handwriting products to evaluate performance. In order to evaluate these finished products, researchers mainly relied on subjective judgement in which techniques such as error classification, observation by means of transparent overlays, and the employment of assessment scales play a central role. In contrast to these studies, the present thesis may be characterized as a study of handwriting movement instead of a study of handwriting products. Furthermore, we claim that the systematic analysis of the kinematics of handwriting movements enables us to make inferences about the underlying psychomotoric processes and their development. In our view, these processes determine to a relatively high degree the actual handwriting performance (Van Galen 1980; Van Galen & Teulings 1983; Van Galen et al. 1986; Van 16 Chapter 1 tactile) is used for the evaluation of motor performance. This evaluation of task performance on the basis of information from various senses is supposed to be necessary for the build-up of internal representations which contain essential information regarding task performance. It is assumed that these representations initiate and shape future actions. The information-processing approach uses constructs such as feedback, schemata, motor programmes and open and closed-loop motor-control mechanisms, not only to explain skilled behaviour, but also to describe changes in skilled behaviour as a result of learning and development (