Browsing by Subject "Handwriting"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Effects of cognitive stress in handwriting movements in a pursuit loop-drawing task.
    (2010-11) Yank, Jane Redfield
    The effects of concurrently presented visual traces of hand movements on timing, smoothness, and spatial accuracy were investigated during a loop-drawing tracking task. Thirty-five healthy young right-handed adults used a stylus on a digitizing tablet to track a left-to-right loop-drawing animation presented on a computer monitor. A dot target moved over a template of twelve connected cursive letter e’s, leaving a track as it drew over each loop in the series. Participants were instructed to draw along with the target to reproduce the shape of the loops at the tempo of the target. Participants performed sixteen trials in a 2 × 2 design, eight trials with their trace visible on the computer monitor and eight trials without a visible trace, half with a constant target rate and half with a variable rate change mid-trial. Spatial accuracy was greater when the participant trace was visible, as expected (p < .0001). An inverse relationship was found between drawing speed and spatial accuracy, consistent with the expectation that more spatial errors would occur at increased speeds. However, timing accuracy (p < .0001) and smoothness (p = .0026) decreased when the participant trace was visible. These results suggest that the visual trace of the participant tracking presented on the computer screen disrupted timing characteristics of perception-action coupling and increased the complexity of the task. Findings are discussed in the context of cognitive load.
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    General outcome measures of beginning handwriting development.
    (2009-03) Bradfield, Tracy Artemis
    Handwriting is the primary form of written expression for young elementary school students and has a tremendous impact on children's ability to express their thoughts in writing. In order for students to be able to use handwriting as an effective tool for written expression, their progress in handwriting skill development must monitored as they receive handwriting instruction. Progress monitoring young children's handwriting development will allow teachers to determine which students are struggling with acquiring the skill and will allow teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of targeted handwriting interventions. However, existing standardized handwriting assessments are not appropriate for use within such a progress monitoring system. In this study, the researcher developed several general outcome measures of beginning handwriting development that could be used within a progress monitoring system for handwriting development. The technical adequacy of these measures was examined, including specific examination of reliability, validity and sensitivity to change in ability due to development or instruction. Results of these examinations and implication for future work are discussed.
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    The “Print o’Life”: Transitions of Text and the Early Modern Stage
    (2024) Biesel, Clara
    Although printing first came to England nearly a century before Shakespeare’s birth, within his lifetime, the use of print quadrupled. This project considers the affective responses visible in Shakespeare’s plays and a pair of contemporary texts (Helkiah Crooke’s anatomy textbook Mikrokosmographia and Martin Billingsley’s handwriting manual The Pen’s Excellencie) as individuals react to the cultural transition from texts produced primarily by hand to texts produced by machine. When read in parallel, these texts reveal a striking ambivalence present in their society as individuals come to grips with how a new technology is changing their understanding of themselves, evoking anxiety over an imagined future and nostalgia for an imagined past. In the context of this transition, richly embodied metaphors consider books imagined as bodies and bodies read as though they were books. The metaphors present bodies and books as though similar enough to be interchangeable, but those using these metaphors (in plays and elsewhere) fail to sustain the comparison. As books replace a physical, “in-person experience” with the printed word, the texts themselves reveal a sense of loss. Be it an anatomist unfolding the interior of a human cadaver which is missing, or direct instruction from a calligraphy teacher demonstrating the proper technique of the hand and the pen, or the living, collaborative, embodied performance of a play, these texts reveal the nostalgia and anxiety about the change towards the printed form. This project pulls together themes and methods from a variety of scholarly fields including print and book history, technology and medical humanities, studies of embodiment (including questions of race and gender), epistemology or knowledge studies, as well as performance, strengthening the connections and intersections between them.