Applying a blended learning approach in a writing ability test for preschool children

Wang Ting-hui, Cherng Rong-ju, Chen Jenn-yeu and Yang Jar-ferr
National Cheng Kung University
Tainan, Taiwan

Eye-hand coordination plays an important role in handwriting. However, children with difficulties in writing are not usually identified until they enter elementary school. The development of a test for eye-hand coordination and validation of its correlation with writing ability would be helpful for identifying children who are at risk of writing difficulty at an earlier age. This paper outlines a study aimed at developing an assessment tool to investigate writing-related skill, determine the difficulty factors, and verify the criterion-related validity and discriminate validity for different age-bands.

Although there is no unified evaluation tool for writing due to language and cultural factors, research results have shown differences between good writers and poor writers in ‘path-tracing’ tasks -- and we, therefore, chose such a task for our assessment. Our newly developed electronic test battery, ‘Literacy Start’, was based on a story, for motivation, and a path-tracing task which included five figures which were created based on the shapes of characters in the story. The design took the following factors into consideration: anthropometric data of preschoolers, inter-joint coordination and some similar existing tests. The test design included the factors of complexity (five), width (two), and size (two). The software recorded performance parameters such as error number, trajectory length in the path, number outside the line barrier of the path, movement time, pen-up time and pen-up number.

Twenty three preschoolers with typical development participated in the preliminary study, and they were divided into three age-groups (junior, middle and senior). They all received ‘Literacy Start’, ‘The Emergent Literacy Scale for Preschoolers’, the Chinese version of ‘The Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor integration’ (VMI) and two VMI-supplementary tests. Each child performed one trial of the tests. Mixed-design repeated measure ANOVAs were used to analyse the differences among the difficulty factors and age groups; and a correlation test was employed to examine the relationships between the scores on the VMI test, VMI-supplementary tests and the performance scores on ‘Literacy Start’.

The results showed that the scores on the VMI test had a moderate negative correlation with the error number and the number outside the line barrier of the path in ‘Literacy Start’. Many performance scores on ‘Literacy Start’ showed that there was a significant effect of complexity of the task, and an age-group effect. According to the findings, this assessment software may verify the age-groups based on different performance profiles; and the difficulty factor can be used to develop further intervention exercises. It is suggested that the merging of the blended learning principle and the assessment tasks into games may be used for identifying preschool children at risk of writing difficulty. The software may also provide therapists or teachers with a tool for eye-hand coordination training.