The ability to write one's own name legibly is a critical lifelong skill for academic success. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of the Handwriting Without Tears® program on teaching a four year-old how to write his first name using proper size, form, and tool. The participant was a four year-old boy in a self-contained…

Writing is a key area of literacy in the early years, however writing receives less research attention than reading despite its impact on students' learning generally, and literacy development specifically. Writing skills have also been shown to be quite stable--good writers in the early years stay good writers in the later years. Therefore it is…

Research on adult writers has shown that writing proceeds through bursts of transcription activity interspersed by long pauses. Yet few studies have examined how these writing behaviors unfold during early and middle childhood. This study traces the progress of bursts, pauses, transcription, and written composition in Portuguese students from…

Writing development seems heavily dependent upon the automatization of transcription. This study aimed to further investigate the link between transcription and writing by examining the effects of promoting handwriting and spelling skills on a comprehensive set of writing measures (viz., bursts and pauses, levels of written language, and writing…

This study presents construct validity for a novel automated morphometric and kinematic handwriting assessment, including (1) convergent validity, establishing reliability of automated measures with traditional manual-derived Minnesota Handwriting Assessment (MHA), and (2) discriminant validity, establishing that the automated methods distinguish…

The development of expertise in writing is a complex but important achievement for young children as they become literate. Writing is a critical component of literacy development, yet there are few accounts of change over time in early writing development that attend to both changes in writing behaviors, the complexity of written messages, and the…

Sequential regression was used to evaluate whether language-related working memory components uniquely predict reading and writing achievement beyond cognitive-linguistic translation for students in Grades 4 through 9 (N = 103) with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) in subword handwriting (dysgraphia, n = 25), word reading and spelling…

Although it may seem logical to assume that giftedness automatically equates with high academic achievement, research has shown that assumption is not always true especially in areas that deal with the communication of understanding and knowledge of a subject. If problems occur in graphic output venues that include handwriting, intervention…

Student consumption and recall of feedback are necessary preconditions of successful formative assessment. Drawing on Sadler's (1998) definition of formative assessment as that which is intended to accelerate learning and improve performance through the providing of feedback, we examine how the mechanism of transmission may impact student…

Early fine motor writing skills are quickly becoming recognized as an important school readiness skill associated with later academic success (Dinehart and Manfra, 2013; Grissmer et al., 2010; Son and Meisels, 2006). Yet, little is known about the development of handwriting, the extent to which it is of value in the early childhood classroom and…

Handwriting is used throughout the school day and is important to demonstrate knowledge. This research evaluated how handwriting instructional practices and intrinsic and extrinsic factors in actual classroom settings impacted learning handwriting over the course of the school year. Findings indicated that extrinsic factors (educational…

Left-handers comprise about 10% of the Australian population. In Australia and elsewhere, there has been a history of discrimination against left-handedness, expressed in a variety of ways. Although negative attitudes to left-handedness have become less common in recent times, researchers have not investigated the extent to which left-handedness…

Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) frequently experience significant difficulty mastering basic academic skills. This meta-analysis focuses on one specific potential area of learning difficulties for these students: namely, writing. To identify the extent and depth of the potential writing challenges faced by students…

This article presents a case study which aims at analyzing the influence that the first language has on the learning of a foreign language. This research was conducted in an ESL classroom from a Language Center in England and was carried out with a Saudi Arabian student during a two-month period. In order to conduct this research, theoretical…

This study examined the Chinese written composition development of elementary-grade students in relation to the simple view of writing. Measures of nonverbal reasoning ability, component skills of transcription (stroke sequence knowledge, word spelling, and handwriting fluency), oral language (definitional skill, oral narrative skills, and…