8 Yandala Pl 12

Kylie Boyd, a pre-service teacher, discusses her research on the academic and emotional impacts of handwriting difficulties in primary school children. She conducted a survey with year one teachers at a large Queensland primary school and received responses from five teachers. The survey found that all teachers reported having students with handwriting difficulties, with an average of 20% of year one teachers struggling. Handwriting difficulties were found to impact academic performance in English, math, science, and humanities. Teachers also observed emotional impacts, including confidence, motivation, behavior, and social isolation. While an occupational therapist was available at the school, access was limited to students with a formal diagnosis. Teachers provided support through fine motor activities, letter formation practice, and recommended resources, but only one mentioned the possibility of a referral to an occupational therapist. The survey highlighted the need for teachers t Hi, I'm Kylie Boyd. I'm a pre-service teacher with Central Queensland University. And today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my current research project, which is on investigating the academic and emotional impacts of handwriting difficulties in primary school aged children. I chose this topic, one, because I've seen a lot of children in the classes that I've been working in struggle in this area, but also because I have a child of my own who also experiences difficulty with handwriting, so it's quite close to my heart in that way. Why is it important? I guess handwriting is one of those critical foundation skills that it's really important to get on top of with children in those early years. If they don't get on top of their handwriting in the early years, they experience lots of different issues both academically and with their self-confidence and emotional regulation, which is outlined in some of the introduction and results that I'll go through with you today. So what did I do? Essentially it was a survey, so it was a case study methodology where we were looking at exploring the experiences of a group of year one teachers in a Queensland primary school. It's a very large school, just to give some context, so it is a prep to year 12, which is quite unique for a state school, and each grade has at least eight classes in each year level. Some of the primary year levels actually have up to 11, so there are a lot of students. It is a very large cohort. So I just looked at a group of year one teachers. There are eight classes that the survey was sent to, or teachers that they were sent to, and from those eight classes I received responses from five teachers. Some of the things that I considered when I was doing this project. So in this project we used a case study methodology to explore the experiences of a group of year one teachers at this school. So there were eight classes in year one. The survey was sent to all year one teachers, and from there I received five responses. Some of the things that I considered to make sure that my research was ethical was that I sought approval from the school and the university before I commenced. Given the size of the school, I was advised that it didn't need to be approved by the principal, that that was something that within their school the deputy principal would approve. So I sought approval from the deputy and she provided that to me, both verbally and also through an email. I also chose to survey only the teachers rather than the students. I initially thought about doing one-on-one interviews with the students, but considering how vulnerable they are and the risk that there could be harm to them by participating, I felt like the best way to minimise that risk is to just work with the teachers. So the teachers were informed of the purpose of the survey, what the data would be used for, all of this prior to agreeing to participate. And I also made sure that the questions in the survey were sensitive and respectful without any stigma or assumption. I wanted to make sure they were aware that participation was voluntary and that they could choose to remain anonymous. I wanted to make sure that the teachers knew that their participation was voluntary and that they could choose to remain anonymous if they wished. I also asked them not to provide any personal identifiable information in the survey with the intent of protecting the privacy of the students in line with the Privacy Act and national privacy principles. They were also told that they could withdraw from participating in the survey at any time if they no longer felt comfortable being involved. Some of the challenges that I experienced in this project, I guess the main challenge in the research project was time and getting approval from a school of that size and also getting responses to my survey required significant follow-up. I also only had time to obtain a small sample group. However, if this project was being conducted over a longer period of time, I would have liked to have explored it further by gathering data from a larger sample group and also including student work samples and other evidence that would support my findings. When I did receive the survey responses and began to analyse the data, I firstly started looking to see how many responses there were and whether they had actually been fully completed. So whether a teacher had gone in and just answered the first couple of questions and not finished it and of the questions that they had answered, had they answered them in the way that I was expecting. I also looked for trends and in the questions where there was data provided, I used that to calculate percentages. I also compared the responses of the teachers and then used that information to create visual graphs for myself so that I could see where there were any trends or themes that were emerging. And then lastly, I just chose from those visual graphs which one I thought was most appropriate to include in my poster, which I have. I then summarised the key findings, which you can see in the results section and conclusion of my poster. So I'm just going to talk through with you briefly the results and the interpretation. So in my survey, all respondents reported having students with handwriting difficulties in their class. So there wasn't a single class where there was no one that was having this difficulty. With an average of 20% of year one teachers struggling with handwriting. So of the teachers responding, the average number of students in the class was 24 and across those classes, there was anywhere between 3 and 10 students that had these difficulties, which averaged out to 5 students per class. So that's a significant amount of students that are experiencing these difficulties. All teachers felt that these handwriting difficulties had an impact on the students academically. So primarily it was English where they had the most difficulty, but there were other subject areas that they felt handwriting impacted as well, things like maths, science and has. And this came down to the students being able to express themselves in writing in these areas and to meet the requirements of the assessment. Teachers observed emotional impacts of handwriting difficulties too. So things like confidence, motivation, behaviour, being able to tolerate when things don't go their way, frustration, tolerance, self-regulation. And one teacher even observed students being socially isolated due to their difficulty with writing. So the teachers indicated that there was an OT within the school that could help them with fine motor activities for students. They did advise that this was only really accessible if the student had a formal diagnosis. And for the bulk of these students experiencing handwriting difficulties, this wasn't something that they had. So therefore it became largely dependent on the classroom teacher to provide handwriting support. When I asked them about what kind of support they were currently providing, most indicated that they encouraged the student to do additional fine motor activities, that they might practice letter formation in class. They might also send some extra homework home for the students with their parents. Once again, things like letter formation or links to useful apps or websites where they can practice their writing. Only one teacher mentioned that they would talk with their parents about the possibility of getting a referral to an occupational therapist. And I found this quite interesting because the literature says that the best form of support is occupational therapy for these students. The literature says that occupational therapy is the most commonly recommended therapy for students experiencing difficulty with handwriting. So as I said, only one teacher mentioned that they would encourage the parents to talk with their GP and recommend the parents ask for a referral to an OT. So I guess the results of my survey indicated to me that although handwriting difficulties are prevalent in primary school aged children, teachers could possibly benefit from just understanding a little bit more about the role occupational therapy can play in improving outcomes for these students. And when would be an appropriate time for them to talk to parents about referral? Because early intervention, according to the literature, is really important for getting the best outcome for these students. And once these students do have a diagnosis, then the teachers can better understand what's causing the handwriting difficulty and what can they do to support the student. Some of the teachers provided writing grips. Some of the teachers provided pencil grips to also support their students. There were some other support mechanisms that were recommended in the literature, things like digital tools for helping the student. Once a student has a diagnosis, it also opens up the opportunity for them to have that in-house fine motor support from the school's occupational therapist.