Wednesday, July 1, 2009
A new direction
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
George 'Shore Assessment'
Referrals from the MOH (Paediatricians etc.) highlight delays in the developmental components of handwriting i.e. fine motor skills, motor planning difficulties, muscle tone, bilateral integration etc..
In order to manage a large number of referrals for handwriting difficulties or delayed pre-writing skills, a handwriting screen is used initially. One of the handwriting screening tools available to the OT in the CDT is the SHORE Handwriting Screening for Early Handwriting Development (SHS), published by Leanne Shore in 2003.
The purpose of this screen is to identify pre-writing and handwriting difficulties in children 3-9 years of age. It prompts identifications of difficulties in the underlying components of handwriting including postural control, hand control, letter/number formation, pre-writing skills and bilateral skills. It allows the examiner to identify whether or not further assessments are necessary and whether or not intervention or adaptations are required.
Conclusion
The purpose of this assignment was to investigate the validity/effectiveness of the SHS as a screening tool for early handwriting development, to identify the need for further assessment, and to identify intervention and/or adaptations required following the screen.
Roger et al., (2003) noted that, as in the case of the SHS, no one assessment addresses all areas of skills, the clinician must determine the missing task and environmental contexts in order to identify the battery of assessments and observations needed in a comprehensive evaluation of motor and functional skills.
As discussed in the assignment, the SHS demonstrates strengths as a screening tool for early handwriting development including the following:
• It uses tasks used by other standardised assessments like the MHT, ETCH, VMI, TOLH, DRHP and CHES.
• The developmental handwriting milestones used in the SHS is supported by over 30 research articles by researchers of handwriting development including Amundson, Weil, Reisman etc.
• Although the visual samples of typical handwriting development offered in the manual, were obtained from typically developing children in the USA, the sample group was diverse with males and females from several racial orientations. Therefore representing some aspect of the children seen by the OT’s in the CDT.
• The SHS score sheet is easy to follow, quick to administer and score. It provides useful information to guide further assessment and intervention required following the screen.
• The SHS displays elements of both the most commonly used methods of evaluation of handwriting, as described by Rosenblum, Weiss and Parush, 2003, namely, a global-holistic evaluation and an analytical evaluation.
• The SHS evaluates components of handwriting researched and found to have an influence on handwriting like postural control, copying, in-hand manipulation and pencil grip.
• As discussed, the SHS facilitates the use of the three most well recognised OT approaches noted by Ideishi, (2003) using a guided score sheet including contextual approach, bottom-up approach and is supported by the professions move towards being more top-down focused in using functional tasks used by children.
• The SHS demonstrates limitations as a handwriting assessment tool in light of the following:
• It is an American based assessment and therefore references are mostly related to USA studies and age norms based on typically developing children in the USA.
• It is not a standardised test therefore it does not provide objective measures and quantitative scores; makes monitoring a child’s progress more difficult, impair clear communication with other professionals and cannot be used successfully for research to advance the field.
• It does not incorporate the link between understanding print (awareness of letters) and ability to write strongly or clearly as it does not prompt reading of copied stimuli – it only prompts the examiner to mark if the child responds spontaneously.
• A tasks/component not used in SHS is writing from memory, alphabet writing and composition.
In light of the above it can be concluded that at the least, SHS is a valid screen for early handwriting assessment. It can be used effectively to identify possible handwriting difficulties and it indicates the need for further assessment if required. It guides the examiner to identify intervention and/or adaptations required following the screen.
It is recommended that in combination with SHS, further emphasis should be made on assessing the relationship of handwriting and understanding print.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Literacy and handwriting
This is from Nikki- She created her own framework to fit with the contextual needs of her work setting.
“The Bank Framework” consists of three stages and is based on the contextual approach and systems theory (Ideshi, 2003; Shumway-Cook & Woolacott 1995). It focuses firstly on establishing a child’s understanding of text, secondly considers the environmental influences affecting the child’s handwriting and then thirdly focuses on the intervention strategies of verbal guidance, based on aspects of the Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance model (Co-op), and multisensory approach .
1. Establishing Knowledge of Text.
Occupational Therapists in schools often work with children who have cognitive impairments in addition to their physical impairment. Cognitive impairments, as much as physical impairments can have considerable effect on handwriting performance. (Jongman et al., 2003). Handwriting is more than just a visual motor task and involves the understanding of a number of literacy concepts to enable meaningful learning (Clay, 1991). Studies by Graham, Harris, MacArthur & Fink (2002) and Hammerschmidt & Sudsawad (2004) found teacher’s theoretical perspectives were valuable for understanding effective writing instruction. Occupational Therapists should consider these as well as focusing on the sensorimotor aspects of handwriting.
Jongman (et al., 2003) and Clay (1991) suggest that in order for a child to write and form letters they need to have some basic concepts of text. That is; they understand messages can be written and that you ‘construct’ the message in speech, that the letters and words form a left to right sequence, there are spaces between letters/words and that the visual forms of their writing attempts have correlation with their oral message. As found by Clay (1970), 2% of 6½ year olds still confused print and pictures as the source of a story. The Ministry of Education Literacy document also suggests children need some basic phonemic knowledge to understand that spoken sounds have letters to represent them (MoE, 2003).
Establishing a child’s understanding of text can effectively be done through liaising with the teacher and observing the child in a writing task. “What the child writes is a rough indicator of how he views printed language” (Clay, 1991, p.97
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Cursive or printing - what shall it be?
This following blurb is from Colleen's assignment
......Addy presents the use of cursive style of writing as being an important aspect of development of speed and fluency. This viewpoint is represented by the New Zealand Department of Education (1985) supplement on teaching handwriting in which they state that the use of ligatures to join letters will increase the speed of writing but that a full cursive style was not necessary to do so. Ziviani and Watson-Will also concluded that cursive writing produced faster output in students (Summers & Cattaro, 2003) In contrast, various authors have disputed this as fact. Graham, Weintraub and Berninger (1998) found that a mixed style of cursive and manuscript was found to be the fastest (Summers & Cattaro, 2003) In their own study of university students, Summers and Cattaro found that no difference was found between writing style and amount of output in an exam situation and supported findings of Graham et al that a mixed style proved to be the fastest.
In my own practice with older students I have suggested learning cursive, mostly I have used Handwriting without Tears (Olsen) programe. My reasoning behind this being that often the children coming to see me have been battling with poor handwriting and inefficient method of writing for years. A new way of writing offers an opportunity to start learning new habits (I especially like HWT for this as the letter style starts from the bottom, and therefore is quite different from how we form printing). However, they will be slower to start off with as they are learning a new habit, and it will take more effort. I do not imagine the students ending up with a handwriting that looks like HWT - however I aim for them to blend towards developing there own mixed style. Therefore I often trade out some of the letters to match more closely to the NZ system , the letters s and f being two examples.
I also feel that cursive writing encourages chunking segments of letters together and as mentioned in a earlier post this can help with increasing speed, and awareness of segments within words.
Rita
Monday, September 8, 2008
Occupational Performance Coaching
The OPC has three enabling domains, these include 1) Emotional support 2) Information Exchange 3) Structured Process.
Emotional Support includes, Listen, Empathise Reframe, Respect and Encourage
Information Exchange includes, performance analysis, typical development, health conditions and impairment, teaching and learning strategies, enabling tricks and community resources and entitlements.
Structures process includes, set goals, explore options, plan actions carry out plan, check performance.
I feel that many of these three domains are used in the telephone conversations I have with parents, and therefore are excited to see them described in the OPC intervention approach. Fi has one article published currently with more on the way. For those interested, Graham, F,. Rodger, S. & Ziviani, J. (2008). Coaching parents to enable childrens particpation: An approach for working with parents and their children. Austrailian Occuaptional Therapy Journal doi:10.1111/j.1440-1630.2008.00736.x
Take Care Rita
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Spelling and Handwriting
Joy has some really interesting links connecting to articles about learning and literacy.
Hope you are all well. Rita
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Handwriting Speed
Therefore he has the motivation to work on this issue. What I did next was write out the "lazy dog jumps over" sentence, and asked him to copy it as fast as possible but still tidy enough that I or his teacher would growl at him. His first attempt he wrote 10 letters in 15 seconds. I then re-wrote the sentence so that he would have a tidy model to copy from and encouraged him to do it again. We did this several times however after the third try I created different sentences so that it was still novel. However this time I asked him if he knew how to spell a word to only look at it once from the model, and write it down. If it was a harder word that he didn't know I showed him how to break the word into segments , scanning the word, copying three letters down and then re-looking at the word. My thinking being that copying words in chunks would be quicker than copying a word letter by letter.
By the end of six practices he has increased to 17 letters per fifteen seconds. An improvement of seven letters with the quality of his writing still being tidy. During the practices he did drop in his rate of writing, we noted that this was when he wrote larger, or when he looked away. Therefore his strategies to be a faster writer include writing with small (normal size) letters, to spell from memory if he knows the word, and to break the words down into chunks if it is a word he doesn't know how to spell. That and just increasing his awareness that actively trying to write faster and staying focused on the task assists in speed of writing.
This was a few hours ago that we did this task. I think I will get him to copy a novel sentence again and see if he has stayed stable in his ability.
Rita
