Poster #61 - Kindergarten Fine Motor Screening Predicts Early Handwriting

• In Event: Poster Session 16

Abstract

Even though digital devices are omnipresent in nowadays society, achieving legible (i.e., neat) and fluent (i.e., automated) handwriting remains a milestone in the school curriculum. Legible and fluent handwriting allows children to devote attentional resources away from the graphomotor processes of handwriting (i.e., transcription) to higher-level text structures, such as composing (Berninger & Winn, 2006). Fine motor skills are crucial for developing the visuomotor integration and graphomotor processes (e.g., in-hand manipulation of the pen) necessary for early handwriting (Dinehart, 2015; Seo, 2018). While visuomotor integration refers to the ability to coordinate visual input (e.g., a letter shape) with a fine motor response (e.g., drawing the shape; Beery et al., 2010), fine motor skills comprise the coordination of small muscle movements of hands and fingers (Bruininks & Bruininks, 2005).
Identifying children with (a risk of) delayed or atypical fine motor development is important to prevent those children from potential handwriting difficulties and a developmental cascade, which may lead to more pronounced and diverse difficulties (e.g., academic; Grissmer et al., 2010, mental health; Hill et al., 2016). The importance of early identification of children with fine motor difficulties raises the question of whether kindergarten teachers can evaluate children’s fine motor development reliably, and to what extent these evaluations predict children’s early handwriting skills in first grade. With the present study, we aim to answer the following research question: Does a Screening of children’s fine motor development in kindergarten (DESK 3-6) predict children’s early handwriting skills (fine motor skills, visuomotor integration, and handwriting legibility) at the end of first grade?
In this longitudinal study, we report data from 82 children (46% girls) with a mean age of 4 years, 10 months (range = 4;2 to 6;1, SD = .47) attending kindergarten at the beginning of the study. Kindergarten teachers rated children’s fine motor development on a five-point Likert scale for each activity of the fine motor subscale of the DESK 3-6 [Dortmund Kindergarten Developmental Screening DESK 3-6] (Tröster et al., 2004), which contains 11 different fine motor activities (e.g., drawing, cutting, opening and closing buttons). Thirty months later, trained experimenters assessed children’s fine motor skills (BOT-2; Bruininks & Bruininks, 2005), visuomotor integration (GRAFOS Screening; authors blinded), and handwriting legibility.
We calculated a multivariate linear regression analysis with the fine motor screening in kindergarten as the independent variable, and children’s fine motor skills, visuomotor integration, and handwriting legibility in first grade as dependent variables. The results presented in Table 1 show that teachers’ evaluations of children’s fine motor development in kindergarten meaningfully predicted performance in fine motor skills at the end of the first grade, with a moderate-to-large effect (β = 0.30), and visuomotor integration (β = 0.26) and handwriting legibility (β = 0.27), both with a moderate effect. This finding indicates that the fine motor subscale of the DESK 3-6 is a reliable instrument that predicts early handwriting skills 30 months later. This enables to support children with difficulties even before they start receiving formal handwriting instructions.

Authors

• Michelle N. Maurer, University of Oslo
  Presenting Author

• Florian Jonas Buehler, Universität Bern