A mixed-methods study investigating the effects of a handwriting and writing intervention in primary school children with handwriting and/or writing difficulties

Abstract

Early intervention programmes for children with handwriting and writing difficulties can have a substantial positive impact on students’ academic achievement throughout their school years. This 9-week mixed methods study investigated the effects of a pilot 5-week intervention on handwriting and writing in primary school children with handwriting and writing difficulties. Six children (5 males, 1 female) aged 10–11 years completed an intervention designed to improve their handwriting and writing. The intervention comprised two components: (1) practice of handwriting aimed at improving writing fluency, alphabet, and handwriting (shape, size, slope, spacing, appearance, and legibility) and 2) increase in metacognitive skills by using prompts and metacognitive language to improve writing content, structure and organisation in both recount and narrative writing. The effects of the intervention on measures of handwriting and writing were assessed at three timepoints (pre and post-intervention and follow-up at week 9). Assessments included group interviews, one-to-one conferencing, “careful prompting,” writing rubric, teacher comments, and analysis of the student researchers’ field notes. Friedman’s test with post-hoc Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with a Bonferroni correction test was used to analyse fluency, alphabet, writing content, structure, organisation and handwriting (shape, size, slope, spacing, appearance, and legibility) assessments. The results of the thematic analyses revealed three main themes; handwriting/writing skills, metacognition/cognition, and attitudes to writing and associated sub-themes. The results of Freidman’s test analyses showed a significant main effect of the intervention on fluency of handwriting, but not on the other handwriting and writing assessments. The results indicated there were small improvements from pre-intervention to post-intervention in the students’ scores for fluency, alphabet assessment and handwriting. The perceived improvement in writing did not encourage the use of the prompts during the assessment. Therefore, additional means should be used to persuade the learner of the usefulness of prompts.