Many students exhibit a special type of learning disability in writing. Yet, teachers spend relatively little time helping children and youth with severe writing difficulties overcome their struggles or prevent emerging problems from becoming more severe. A major reason for this lack of attention is that many educators feel overburdened by the…

Problems with handwriting can negatively impact the writing of students with learning disabilities. In this article, an example is provided of a fourth-grade special education teacher's efforts to assist a new student by using a problem-solving approach to help determine an efficient course of action for special education teachers who are trying…

Students with writing difficulties and learning disabilities struggle with many aspects of the writing process, including use of sentence-level skills. This literature review summarizes results from 19 published articles that used single-case or group-experimental and quasi-experimental designs to investigate effects of intervention on the…

As new research shows how effective systematic and explicit teaching of language-based skills is for students with learning disabilities--along with the added benefits of multisensory techniques--discover the latest on this popular teaching approach with the third edition of this bestselling textbook. Adopted by colleges and universities across…

The approach, which has also been used successfully with learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed children, provides a systematic method of instruction and stresses the use of sensory and verbal cues as aids in learning manuscript writing. (DLS)

This study was designed to examine the effects of tracing and fading prompts to improve the handwriting of two preschoolers both diagnosed as Developmentally Delayed (DD) and one of whom had fine motor goals. The study took place in a self-contained special education public preschool classroom located in the Pacific Northwest. The results showed…

The authors describe a remedial technique for teaching letter formation to students with handwriting difficulties. The approach blends traditional procedures (modeling, physical prompts, tracing, self correction, etc.) with cognitive behavior modification principles. (CL)

The article discusses the teaching of cursive writing to learning disabled and other handicapped children at an early age in conjunction with, and as an aid to, reading and spelling. A structured, logical, and sequential method of teaching cursive writing is presented, along with reinforcement and review procedures. (DLS)

Fourth graders with learning disabilities in transcription (handwriting and spelling), LD-TD, and without LD-TD (non-LD), were compared on three writing tasks (letters, sentences, and essays), which differed by level of language, when writing by pen and by keyboard. The two groups did not differ significantly in Verbal IQ but did in handwriting,…

The question and answer format of this booklet presents 35 questions about handwriting most often asked by teachers and parents. The answers that follow each question are derived from an earlier study of handwriting instruction undertaken in Ontario, Canada, schools. The questions in the first section of the booklet deal with current handwriting…

The article proposes a simplified handwriting method for learning disabled children having difficulty with conventional cursive writing. The approach is based on the vertical downstroke rather than the diagonal slant and emphasizes the natural connection between manuscript letters. (Author/CL)

A reversal design with multiple baseline features was used to assess the efficacy of self-instructions, self-correction, and a combination of the two on a nine-year-old learning disabled boy's handwriting performance. (Author)

The article discusses ways to help learning disabled and other young children learn to write numerals through the use of fading, development of prewriting skills, analysis of numeral form, and avoidance of reversals. The issue of dominance is briefly discussed. Sixteen learning activities prior to using worksheets are listed. (DB)

An 11 year old learning disabled boy was taught two different strategies, both of which markedly improved his handwriting performance on a paragraph copying task. Results for the study indicated that allowing the student his choice of strategies produced better performance than did teacher determined choices. (Author)

Described is a four step method of teaching remedial handwriting which encourages the progressive approximation of writing to a good model and avoids common instructional errors such as unsupervised massed practice, lack of immediate feedback, and failure to provide good models. (DB)