Good Handwriting Skill Leads to Good Grades – A Study

Handwriting, who works on that anymore? Well, turns out with the onset of exponential use of computers, iPads, and programs like MS Word, working on improving your handwriting skill is passé. However, new researchers have discovered that there are correlations between good handwriting and good grades. Teachers from top schools in Delhi, always emphasize on handwriting improvement lessons and classes. There is a list of schools in Delhi where special classes are conducted to improve students’ handwriting skills that apparently leads to higher grades and better overall performance of the child.

A principal of one of the top schools in Delhi, shared the study that was lead by Laura Dinehart, a professor at Florida International University. The professor claimed that handwriting really matters in the overall performance of the child in academics. The study showed that children who had strong handwriting skills are more likely to achieve excellence academically in elementary school. Dinehart concluded that handwriting is often given less priority than other subjects and it seems deemed important when compared to other subjects.

 As a trend in recent years, we have seen that top schools in Delhi and other metropolitan cities in India shows a keen interest in other subjects, such as mathematics, science, English, grammar, arithmetic, etc. Unlike previous decades, there is a steep decline in interest of teachers in developing writing skills of students. Ironically, they are not responsible for this lack of interests. Modern technology has an important role to play these days and modern workplaces are going paperless, rest assured, and no place for manual writing work anymore. When, as a contrary, educationists, academicians, and scientists claim that students who have greater ease in handwriting are sure to perform better in academic skills, like reading and math.

So how the findings are conducted?

Professor Dinehart worked on 1000 students, studying in 2^nd grade in Miami-Dade County Public schools and observed the gathered data while linking their scores back to where they started in pre-kindergarden. It was observed by veteran teachers and Principals of top schools in Delhi, that those students who received good grades in writing, which is considered as fine motor skills, in pre-K has an average GPA of 2.84 in reading and 3.02 in math – B average, as per FIU. The students who did not secure good scores on fine motor writing tasks in Pre-K secured average GPA of 2.12 in reading and 2.30 in math – C as an average.

Also, it has been observed by tenured professionals in that list of schools in Delhi, showed that students who did well on fine motor writing jobs in pre-K scored in the 59th percentile on the reading SAT in second-grade and in the 62nd percentile on Math SAT. Additionally, the observations showed that students performed poorly in fine motor tasks in pre-K scored in the 38^th percentile on the reading SAT and 37nd percentile only on the Math SAT.

However, professionals and teachers in top schools in Delhi, recommends that there is still much research required to be performed and hidden truths and facts needed to be discovered.   


All this brings us to the conclusion that teachers and parents need to include developing handwriting skills again in the core curriculum and perceive it to be as important as it was before the inception of the new digital era.