THE INFLUENCE OF HANDWRITING ON ASSESSMENT

Abstract

The purpose of the experiment described in this paper was to see if teachers, in their assessment of children's essays, were influenced by the quality of the handwriting style. Ten essays were chosen from a large number written by 11‐year‐old children on the theme ‘The day of the big fog’. A range of 10 contrasting handwriting styles was chosen from those of other children, and the 10 handwriters reproduced each of the 10 essays, thus giving 100 combinations of content and handwriting styles. Groups of teachers to assess the essays were chosen as follows: there were ten judging groups of five teachers each, each group representing one school; five of the schools were primary and five secondary. The teachers’ instructions were to ‘impression mark’ and to rank the essays. There was no indication of the fundamental purpose of the experiment. Analysis of variance was used to determine the results. These indicated, firstly, that the handwriting did have a significant influence on the teachers’ marking (p=0.001), and secondly, that there may be a primary/secondary difference of attitude towards handwriting.