Abstract
ABSTRACT We describe the development of an evidence-based motor intervention and an implementation pilot study in ten primary schools, involving 515 children (4–11 years). ‘Helping Handwriting SHINE’ (HHS) is a novel, school-led, group-based handwriting intervention. Teaching staff delivered HHS and provided feedback through a questionnaire, reporting that: (i) the children found the tasks enjoyable; (ii) the background and booklet instructions were easy to understand, (iii) there was a need for more comprehensive staff training. The teaching staff made recommendations about session duration, group size, resource availability, and age differentiation of tasks. These suggestions are applicable to the development of any school-based group-led motor intervention, and we used this feedback to refine the HHS intervention. This study shows that implementing school-led motor interventions at scale is possible. Moreover, the work provides insights into the factors to consider when developing school-based motor interventions prior to conducting randomized controlled trials (RCT). The process outlined in this manuscript has led to an RCT to test the effectiveness of HHS within primary schools.
Highlights
Handwriting continues to be the main way of authoring text in the classroom and is the standard method of communication used in most examinations (McMaster & Roberts, 2016; Santangelo & Graham, 2016)
Two of the ten schools dropped out during the course of the study, one from each wave (68 and 60 participating children, respectively). For one of these schools, the new intervention lead did not know when to start the study because there was a changeover of staff
Possible barriers to autonomous implementation by teaching staff were identified via infor mal discussions held as part of the two pre-intervention briefing meetings and through an online post-intervention feedback questionnaire, which received 19 responses (See S3 File for the questions asked and sample responses)
Summary
Handwriting continues to be the main way of authoring text in the classroom and is the standard method of communication used in most examinations (McMaster & Roberts, 2016; Santangelo & Graham, 2016). This remains the situation despite the growing use of technology (such as tablets and laptops) within educational settings. This means that children who struggle in acquiring age-appropriate handwriting skills are at a considerable disadvantage in a number of different ways.
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