title: Development of cursive handwriting.
abstract: The efficiency of two different instructional methods for improving the growth of handwriting quality in the upper grades of primary school was investigated in field experiments using a control-group design. No improvement in mean quality was found for a group of 38 children using a method based on copying exercises. A substantial improvement in mean quality, corresponding to about 1.4 SD, was found for 23 children using a method based on reintroduction of the letter forms explaining each form visually and verbally. It was concluded that the bottleneck in the development of handwriting quality in primary school is a mismatch between the instructional methods used and the perceptual ability of the children.
authors.affiliation: Department of Education, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Karlsdottir
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006236:Handwriting; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009664:Norway; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods*