Semiautomatic Study of Handwriting Development in Basque Children at Primary School

Abstract

The aim of this case study is to understand the connections between process factors of writing, such as bursts and fluency/speed, and product factors related to linguistic complexity and the quality of the final text. With this purpose, we conducted a (pilot) study with 13 developing writers in Basque from the second year of Primary School in two scholar periods to compare their progress in writing. The analysis of the process factors was based on bursts’ measures and pauses duration described using HandSpy, a tool that allows one to describe and observe the process of handwriting in a digital platform. Thus, the HandSpy tool automatically analyzed the bursts and pauses, but the linguistic analysis of the texts produced were manually coded by aggregating a linguistic classification at both sentence- and wordlevels while taking into account all the letter revisions that the child attempted. A cursory analysis of our data points to a link between the length of the bursts and the child's fluency, on the one hand, and the complexity /quality of the text produced, on the other. The overall study is a valuable contribution for education practitioners to encourage them to consider not only the handwriting product, the final text, but also the entire process of writing to address the needs of a wide diversity of learners and design new forms of feedback when teaching writing.