Predicting School Readiness from Stroke Directions in Children's Printing

Abstract

The present investigation was undertaken to test a long-standing claim that the stroke directions used by kindergarten children when they form horizontal, vertical, and circular lines, can aid in screening these children for school readiness. One-hundred-and-eight onrepeating kindergarten children were asked to print a series of letters and numbers while an observer recorded the stroke directions employed by each child. In agreement with views held at the Gesell Institute, the outcome showed that children at the extreme opposite ends of a school readiness continuum differed reliably in the percentage of normative stroke directions used to construct each of these three basic line types. Despite this, however, the overall correlation between these two variables was sufficiently low to suggest the need for considerable caution when using stroke direction information to screen kindergarten children for school entry.

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