Development of Cursive Handwriting

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.