Assessing visibility,legibility and comprehension for interactive whiteboards (IWBs) vs. computers

The usability of interactive whiteboards vs. computers was evaluated on three dimensions (visibility, legibility and comprehension) in the secondary school pupils. The visibility assessment consisted in detecting a visual stimulus varying in luminance using a staircase procedure, legibility was assessed with a target-search task, and we administered narrative and explanatory texts with or without illustrations to evaluate comprehension. The results of the visibility test showed that pupils found the light signal easier to detect on the IWB. For the legibility test, we observed differences in error rates and discriminability according to medium, font size and congruence between target and the distractor letters. Performances in the comprehension test were similar for both explanatory and narrative texts. Moreover, the presence of illustrations does not improve comprehension. These results could be related to the hierarchical structure of the texts, which facilitate comprehension.     

Dot-to-dot practice enhances Children's handwriting: The advantage of a multi-session training protocol

Handwriting instruction commonly involves the practice of non-linguistic writing-like patterns. Here, we compare the transfer to Arabic sentence-writing of different practice scheduling of the Invented Letter Task (ILT), a simple dot-to-dot connecting task, aiming to decide best-practice scheduling. Ninety-seven 7- to 8-year-old public-school Arab Israeli second-graders were assigned randomly, within-class, to five study groups: three single-session practice groups (different amounts, with 60/180/360 repetitions), a 360-repetition multi-session practice group (distributed across four days), and an untrained control group. Handwriting was assessed at pre-training, 24-h, and 4–5 weeks post-training. The findings revealed that by 4–5 weeks post-training all the practice groups wrote more fluently or accurately than the control group. The multi-session practice group's handwriting performance was advantageous to that of the other groups, being more fluent than the other groups and more legible than the control group. The findings suggest that practicing simple grapho-motor tasks may enhance handwriting abilities.     

Product and Process Evaluation of Handwriting Difficulties

Handwriting is a complex human activity that entails an intricate blend of cognitive, kinesthetic, and perceptual-motor components. Children are expected to acquire a level of handwriting proficiency that enables them to make skillful use of handwriting as a tool to carry out their work at school. Poor handwriters have difficulty developing their writing skills and, as a result, often suffer in their educational and emotional development. This article highlights the importance of handwriting and reviews the development of methods used to evaluate handwriting difficulties. Included also is a discussion of methodological aspects of current handwriting evaluations and a presentation of research on the use of a computerized system that may be helpful in better understanding the handwriting process of poor writers. The article concludes by outlining future directions in handwriting evaluation that combine the assessment of the handwriting product with computerized analysis of the handwriting process.