A new study in the Journal of Educational Psychology explored how young children simultaneously develop the cognitive, physical, and emotional components of writing during their first formal year of school. The researchers focused on core elements of early writing: writing quality, handwriting fluency, spelling, and motivational beliefs. They assessed the students at the beginning, middle and end of the school year. While girls and students who started first grade later outscored boys and younger peers from the start, all students showed statistically signficiant gains in all four areas as the year progressed. Specifically, students’ handwriting fluency increased, they could spell more words correctly, they developed more positive beliefs about writing, and the quality of what they wrote improved.
Most notably, even after controlling for age, gender, and teaching time, students who made greater progress in handwriting fluency and spelling skills produced higher quality writing. Students' motivational beliefs -- attitudes toward writing and confidence in their ability to regulate their writing -- also directly predicted their overall writing quality at the end of the year. These findings highlight the importance of handwriting fluency, spelling, and writing motivational beliefs in children’s writing in the early years.
StepUp Note
This research shows that handwriting fluency is an important tool for learning for children in first grade who are developing the skills of handwriting, spelling and written language. In the StepUp program we see that fluent handwriting is a tool for learning, but disfluent handwriting is a distraction from learning therefore fluency exercises are a part of our daily handwriting activities
Note by Nancy W. Rowe, MS, CCC/A