The aim of this study is to find out how various tools, digital as well as analogue, affect pupils spelling. Through a systematic literature study, this paper contributes with a research overview of what existing research shows for this subject. The results show, even though all research is not united, that pupils spelling is positively affected when the student is allowed to use their body and write by hand with the pencil. The digital tools can also contribute to the pupil's spelling developing despite the concerns over the word processing programs that exist. For students with learning disabilities, and who for various reasons have problems with the pen grip or to form letters, the digital tools can open up to a more equal school where all pupils can be equally active. The conclusion in this study shows that the choice of writing tools for the student needs to be individual as all students do not master the pen. The results in this study however points to, for pupil´s spelling, that the pen as a writing tool can be better than the digital tools.

Forensic Handwriting Examination The aim of this thesis is to introduce the Forensic handwriting examination as one of the disciplines of Forensic identification, to describe its methods and procedures, and to demonstrate them on specific examples. The aim of the practical part of the thesis is to apply the findings described in the theoretical part of the thesis to the handwriting examination carried out by the author of the thesis, to experimentally verify some of hypotheses presented in the thesis, such as the influence of various factors on the handwriting of an individual, and to examine the most frequent methods of deliberate alteration of one's handwriting. The first chapter of the thesis is focused on the definition of the term "Handwriting Examination", on a brief examination of the history of this branch of forensic science, and on the analysis of its relations to other fields of forensic science, especially to the graphology. The following chapter describes the procedure of establishing one's handwriting habits, the influence of the Czech handwriting system taught to children, and some of the internal and external factors which influence one's handwriting. The third chapter examines the major subject matters of handwriting examination, describes several specific attributes of letters,...

The main topic of my diploma thesis is the diagnosis and the therapy of handwriting training of hand grasp in preschool children. This diploma thesis describes and evaluates possibilities of using a handwriting tool, which was developed in cooperation with Centre for Biomedical Engineering and 1. Faculty of Medicine, for hand grasp testing. A handwriting tool measures fingers grip pinch while the fingers are used in hand grasp. The theoretic part comprehend useful findings about handwriting, its development. In detail it is focused on diagnosis and therapy of hand grasp, which is an important aspect in handwriting development. This theoretic part also includes description of handwriting disabilites in preschool children and description handwriting tools, which are used for correct hand grasp training. The conclusion of the theoretic part is focused on therapy of hand grasp and handwriting training from the ergotherapist point of view. The goal of the practical part is to find out fingers pinch in hand grasp in normal healthy preschool children using a specialy developed handwriting tool and to recommend another possibilites of using this new tool in handwriting training.

TITLE Handwriting development from 1st to 5th grade of elementary school Author: Mgr. et Mgr. Olga Kučerová Department: Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education Charles University Supervisor: Doc. PhDr. PaedDr. Anna Kucharská, Ph. D. ABSTRACT This dissertation project describes the development phases of the handwriting skills from 1st to 5th grade. The aim of this project is to describe the procedure of dynamic handwriting acquisition concerning two different alphabetic scripts used in Czech elementary schools. These include the traditional cursive script and alternative script that is Comenia Script. We focus on two different styles of penmanship, which are being taught in Czech elementary schools - cursive writing and manuscript writing. Our research sample includes two groups. The first group comprises writers who employ the cursive handwriting style of penmanship, whereas the second group considers the Comenia Script writer i.e. the manuscript style. The research consists of two parts - the theoretical and practical part. The theory defines the basic concepts related to handwriting skills and handwriting development. A substantial part focuses on both styles of penmanship - traditional cursive writing and Comenia Script. We depict their formal characteristics, circumstances of origin and the...

Abstract The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of the teacher's approach to writing instruction and their view of fine motor development and fine motor difficulties for students in grades 1-3. By comparing a selection of teachers’ approaches to writing tuition and fine motor skills, with previous research it expects to gain a deeper understanding of the objective. In the study, qualitative semi-structured interviews and participant observation was used as a method. These interviews and observations were made with seven active Swedish teachers in grades 1-3. This gives an insight into teachers' views on fine motor skills and education, as well as how they see the adjustment of the writing instruction to students with fine motor difficulties. The results show that most of the teachers who participated in the study linked fine motor difficulties to the way students holding a pencil, as well as how they shape the letters. Most of the teachers say that they don´t practice fine motor exercises in the classroom, although the results shows that often it is done unconsciously. The first letter of the learning takes place mostly from a formal perspective. In most cases, when the first letter of the learning process is complete, the writing instruction, to some extent, starts from a functional perspective. / Sammanfattning Syftet med denna studie är att få en fördjupad förståelse för lärares förhållningssätt till skrivundervisning och deras syn på finmotorisk utveckling och finmotoriska svårigheter hos elever i årskurs 1-3. Genom att jämföra ett urval lärares förhållningssätt till skrivundervisning och finmotorik samt att jämföra detta med tidigare forskning förväntas en fördjupad förståelse för syftet att införskaffas. I studien har kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer och deltagande observationer använts som metod. Dessa intervjuer samt observationer har skett med sju verksamma svensklärare i årskurs 1-3. Detta ger en inblick i lärarnas syn på finmotorik och skrivundervisning samt hur de ser på anpassning av skrivundervisning till elever med finmotoriska svårigheter. Resultatet visar att de flesta lärare som medverkat i studien kopplar finmotoriska svårigheter till hur eleverna håller i en penna och hur de formar bokstäver. Några uttalade finmotoriska övningar sker inte i klassrummet, ändå sker dessa övningar många gånger, men då omedvetet. Den första bokstavsinlärningen visar sig till största del ske utifrån ett formellt perspektiv. När den första bokstavsinlärningen är färdig så övergår skrivundervisningen, i de flesta fall, även med utgångspunkt ur ett funktionellt perspektiv.

The aim of this study is to investigate how teachers and primary school pupils view the use of handwriting in literacy tuition and what their thoughts are on the future of handwriting. In the study, handwriting is compared to today’s digital ways of writing. The study sets out from the Swedish curriculum (Lgr 11) and is based on interviews with teachers and pupils in grades 1–3. The results show that the pupils tend to see handwriting mainly from an individual perspective and that they consider it to be important knowledge in adult and professional life. The teachers in the study view handwriting from a pedagogical perspective and focus mainly on its role in literacy tuition. In contrast to the pupils involved in the study, the teacher are uncertain regarding the future of handwriting.

Nous présentons une approche de reconnaissance d'écriture manuscrite à partir de champs de Markov cachés et fondée sur une analyse entièrement bidimensionnelle de l'écriture. Son originalité réside dans la combinaison d'une analyse fenêtrée de l'image, d'une modélisation markovienne et dans la mise en oeuvre de la programmation dynamique 2D qui permet un décodage rapide et optimal des champs de Markov. Un aspect important de ces travaux est la méthodologie de développement employée qui est centrée sur l'évaluation systématique des apports algorithmiques et des paramètres utilisés. Ces algorithmes sont en partie empruntés aux techniques utilisées dans le domaine de la reconnaissance de la parole et sont très génériques.<br /><br />L'approche proposée est validée sur deux applications correspondant à des bases de données standard et librement disponibles. L'application de cette méthode extrêmement générique à une tâche de reconnaissance de chiffres manuscrits a permis d'obtenir des résultats comparables à ceux de l'état de l'art. L'application à une tâche de reconnaissance de mots manuscrits a permis de confirmer que l'extension de cette approche à des tâches plus complexes était naturelle.<br /><br />L'ensemble de cette recherche a démontré la validité de l'approche développée qui apparaît comme candidate au statut d'approche standard pour plusieurs problèmes de vision. En outre, elle ouvre la voie à de très nombreux développements concernant la tâche de traitement de l'écriture manuscrite et des améliorations significatives pourraient encore être apportées en recourant à d'autres principes issus du traitement de la parole et du langage. D'autres tâches comme la segmentation d'image devraient tirer avantage de la robustesse et de la faculté d'apprentissage de la modélisation que nous proposons.

This study analyzed the effects of restricting the response space and selfevaluation on students' handwriting quality in two beginning handwriters and two experienced handwriters. Students executed letters with and without using a transparent overlay, in a multiple-baseline-across-letters design. The use of the transparent overlay included drawing letters in a space restricted by the transparency; overlaying a model letter on top of the written letter and; evaluating if the two letters matched. Letter quality immediately improved when overlays were used, and handwriting quality maintained when the writing response was not restricted by the overlay transparency. Prompting and feedback were delivered contingent on on-task behavior. Analysis was based on three different measurement systems.

Cette recherche avait pour objectif de tracer le portrait des habiletés graphomotrices d’élèves de deuxième année du primaire fréquentant le milieu scolaire francophone québécois. Elle visait aussi à comparer l’évolution au cours de la deuxième année du primaire des habiletés graphomotrices, orthographiques et rédactionnelles des participants selon le style d’écriture appris et mobilisé (script ou cursif) et en fonction de différents niveaux graphomoteurs (fort et faible). Globalement, les résultats suggèrent que les élèves québécois de deuxième année, qu’ils écrivent en script ou en cursif depuis le début de leur scolarisation, ont une fluidité graphomotrice qui est comparable et qui se traduit par la production en moyenne d’environ 14 lettres lisibles par minute en début d’année et de 20 en fin d’année. Tant en script qu’en cursif, la vitesse d’écriture des élèves de deuxième année évolue positivement en cours d’année, mais ceux qui écrivent en script manifestent une progression de vitesse plus marquée. En revanche, concernant la lisibilité des lettres, les élèves qui écrivent en script atteignent un plateau en début d’année, alors qu’une amélioration s’observe entre le début et la fin de la deuxième année chez les élèves qui écrivent en cursif. La comparaison des performances et de l’évolution des habiletés orthographiques et rédactionnelles des élèves de deuxième année pointe des écarts importants pour les variables d’orthographe en copie différée, de longueur et de contenu des textes selon que les élèves présentent une bonne ou une faible fluidité graphomotrice, indépendamment du style d’écriture mobilisé (script ou cursif). Finalement, du point de vue de l’évolution des habiletés orthographiques et rédactionnelles, l'étude n’a pas permis d’identifier un avantage pour l’un ou l’autre des styles d’écriture, et ce, tant chez les élèves forts sur le plan graphomoteur que chez les élèves plus faibles.

Optical character recognition (OCR) software has advanced greatly in recent years. Machine-printed text can be scanned and converted to searchable text with word accuracy rates around 98%. Reasonably neat hand-printed text can be recognized with about 85% word accuracy. However, cursive handwriting still remains a challenge, with state-of-the-art performance still around 75%. Algorithms based on hidden Markov models have been only moderately successful, while recurrent neural networks have delivered the best results to date. This thesis explored the feasibility of using a special type of feedforward neural network to convert freeform cursive handwriting to searchable text. The hidden nodes in this network were grouped into clusters, with each cluster being trained to recognize a unique character bigram. The network was trained on writing samples that were pre-segmented and annotated. Post-processing was facilitated in part by using the network to identify overlapping bigrams that were then linked together to form words and sentences. With dictionary assisted post-processing, the network achieved word accuracy of 66.5% on a small, proprietary corpus. The contributions in this thesis are threefold: 1) the novel clustered architecture of the feed-forward neural network, 2) the development of an expanded set of observers combining image masks, modifiers, and feature characterizations, and 3) the use of overlapping bigrams as the textual working unit to assist in context analysis and reconstruction.