Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The study investigated whether providing instruction on the stroke sequence would facilitate the learning of writing Chi-nese characters in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and typically developing (TD) children. Thechildren wrote six characters, three with stroke sequence instruction and three without. Each character was repeated 40times. Trajectory, speed, on-paper time, in-air time, and number of changes in velocity direction per stroke (NCV) weremeasured with Wacom Intuos 5 digitizing writing tablet. The results showed a significant group effect, time (practice)effect and instruction effect but no interaction effects. Both groups of children showed a similar trend of improvementover practice with decreasing trajectory, increasing speed, decreasing on-paper time and in-air time. With stroke sequenceinstruction, both groups of children learned at a similar rate on most of the writing parameters. Instruction on strokesequences helped the character writing of both the DCD children and the TD children.