Preliminary study on implications of cursive handwriting learning in schools

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe a new database acquired in two different elementary schools of Barcelona province. The study assessed the effect of the type of handwriting learning in general writing performance. In the first school, classical cursive handwriting is learnt while the second one substitutes this skill for keyboarding and print-script handwriting. Analyses in two different groups of age (8–9 and 11–12 years old) for both schools have been performed. A set of 14 different handwriting tasks has been acquired for each student using an Intuos Wacom series 4 tablet plus ink pen and specific software to conduct the analysis. The results revealed that cursive handwriting might improve the handwriting performance by increasing the speed of writing and drawing.