Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Here's a good up to date handwriting assessment


Whenever I have an OT student, I feel this need to make sure I'm actually using the most up to date resources and assessments. It's part of making sure that I'm at least one step ahead of them at all times. That's part of the reason I enjoy having students, although the constant thinking does wear me out ...and may lead to periods of extreme crankiness at home....

Last night's internet searching yielded the McMaster Handwriting Assessment Protocol. It looks pretty good. I'm not sure why I haven't heard more about it around the OT world. I suppose I have been on leave for a while. And I haven't done any professional development on handwriting for some time.

It's pretty detailed. It covers composition, near and far point copying, dictation and writing from memory, as well as giving a writing speed in letters per minute. There are a few Canadian and US-centric words like "candy" and "jar" in it that I might need to change. I don't know if we'll be able to use all of it with each of the kids we need to screen. But I think I might look at using parts of it. It looks like a good way for the students to consider that handwriting is a bit more involved than just copying the "quick brown fox" sentence out once (which I think has historically been standard practice for many OTs, including me....).


3 comments:

Wendy said...

Cool, and it's free too?!? Thanks for this.

Handwriting Analysis said...

Hello,

Your Post is very interesting and very unique, about handwriting assessment is good work.Thanks For Sharing.


Anonymous said...

Hi Karen,

Hope you're doing well! I work with CanChild at McMaster University. Part of my role is to search out the locations that our products live on the web. In doing so, I noticed that the above link for the Handwriting Assessment Protocol is broken. Would you mind updating the link to: https://canchild.ca/en/shop/32-handwriting-assessment-protocol-3rd-edition, please?

All the best,
Bailey