Back in 2012 Dr Karen Ray was working as an occupational therapist in schools when she noticed unusually high numbers of Prep children were experiencing problems with handwriting fluency.

“[Prep is when] children are first learning letter names and sounds and connecting them with forms – and the rates I was seeing of referral were really what I thought were quite high…

“And so in my clinical role, I started investigating possible approaches,” Ray tells EducationHQ.

The inquiry led the expert to Write Start, an explicit approach to handwriting instruction out of the US, designed for Grade 1 children.

“This intervention is effectively an occupational therapy and teacher-led whole-of-class intervention,” Ray explains.

“The instruction is explicit, direct instruction of letter formation for the whole class, followed by station-based activities where kids rotate around different activities – but those were very tailored to develop letter writing fluency from what’s known as the ‘best evidence’.”

This involves plenty of memory recall, lots of practice and direct teacher feedback, she adds.

Keen to assess the impact of the program on Preps’ wider literacy skills, Ray launched her own study gauging the impact of two modified 45-minute Write Start sessions delivered over the course of a school term.

The results were incredibly promising, she suggests.

“Children got better at letter writing fluency, measured by our measure – Letter Form Assessment – as well as alphabet writing, but they also got better at some of these other literacy measures, particularly their word writing.”

Students in the intervention were able to write more words and had improved letter name knowledge and word reading skills than the control group.

“But interestingly, with their perceptual motor skills, we didn’t see any significant effects,” Ray notes.

The study really showed that further research is needed to unpack exactly how perceptual motor and cognitive skills might interact to influence children’s literacy, the researcher flags.

Dr Karen Ray, pictured above, says we shouldn't discard our focus on handwriting in primary schools anytime soon.

For older children, that is Grade 1 and above, there’s a solid body of evidence to suggest handwriting fluency equates to improved writing outcomes. This is based on cognitive load theory, Ray shares.

“If you automate some foundational skills like handwriting, and you [do] it without thinking, the idea is that you free up mental space, cognitive space for higher level things like planning, organising your ideas, remembering the text type that you’re trying to write, or the structure of it.

“That’s been a fairly well-established idea and supported with research, that when you improve handwriting fluency, you get better writing, not just quantity, so number of words, but quality, so better content.”

In the age of AI and online communication, some might argue classroom instruction is better focused elsewhere than on the seemingly irrelevant skill of handwriting.

But Ray cautions we should be extremely careful on this front.

“The most important thing is, what are we discarding here? And is [handwriting] something that is particularly relevant for some learners?”

Handwriting could well be a ‘very important neurological hook’ for some children, she warns.

“[Some children might not] connect to how handwriting instruction and reading instruction is typically delivered, which is visual information, auditory information.

“[Usually these] two things can get processed together quite effectively, and can help children make these maps in their mind of letters and words.

“But perhaps for some children, and I speculate, they may need that additional scaffold or that additional piece of neurological glue, if you like, to connect the dots when they’re learning to read.”

Ray is all too aware that she’s speaking on a hunch here, but suggests the research supporting this idea is progressing.

“You can start to feel like a modern day luddite when you’re like, ‘no, let’s keep focusing on handwriting,’ when we’ve got all these technological advances.

“But I do have a strong feeling – and I’m not alone, there are other researchers doing amazing work in this field, and continuing to ask this important question.”

The commentary follows a call from a Melbourne speech pathologist for a single basic handwriting style – one that’s devoid of weird squiggles and fancy cursive – that all children are taught starting out in school.

Alison Clarke works with children ‘in the bottom 20 per cent’ of literacy proficiency in Victoria, and has warned the font taught to students across the state – beginner versions of Victorian Modern Cursive – is unnecessarily confusing for novice writers.

“We have kids come in here doing their ‘e’s backwards. They don’t know that ‘j’ is a hanging down letter, and they write it like a backwards ‘i’.  

“You think, ‘I’ve got some really weird letters here’.”

There are currently five approved handwriting styles for beginners, most with manuscript, pre-cursive and cursive versions across the country, Clarke noted.

The expert suggested many teachers had likely missed out on learning evidence-aligned handwriting instruction in their university training.

“So, the mechanics of handwriting, I think, have been really under-taught. And that’s not a criticism of teachers. That’s a systemic problem.”