Study protocol: DigiHand – the emergence of handwriting skills in digital classrooms

Abstract

This protocol article presents the project “DigiHand: The emergence of handwriting skills in digital classrooms.”1 The project is a longitudinal natural experiment investigating how the use of different writing tools influences students’ handwriting and letter knowledge, word reading, spelling, written narrative composition and teacher–student interactions in Grades 1 and 2 (students aged 6 years in Grade 1). Participants are 33 schools (n = 585 students) representing three occurring conditions for learning writing skills in early years. Students in these conditions either (1) learn to write on a tablet while postponing handwriting, (2) learn both to handwrite and write on a tablet or (3) learn to handwrite. Effect analyses are conducted on four main domains of measures: (i) students’ letter knowledge, spelling competence and word reading competence; (ii) students’ handwriting fluency; (iii) students’ ability to write narrative compositions; (iv) quality of teacher–student interactions. This protocol describes the background, design and pre- and outcome measures for the research project.