Validity of an Automated Handwriting Assessment in Occupational Therapy Settings

In today’s digitized world, it is easy to forget that handwriting is a necessary developmental skill. Handwriting remains the primary form of communication in the classroom and is still one of the most common reasons that students are referred to Occupational Therapists (OTs). Unfortunately, the existing methods of handwriting assessment, including the Handwriting Without Tears–Print Tool (HWT-PT) and Minnesota Handwriting Assessment (MHA), are time consuming and labor-intensive to score. Further, they rely on categorical scores, which may not be as sensitive to impairment as continuous metrics. This study aimed to address such limitations by further examining the validity of an automated digitized handwriting assessment tool that was previously used to digitally score the MHA. Additionally, we aimed to expand the use of this digitized tool to the HWT-PT, across a clinical sample. Results indicated that digitized measures of size were highly correlated with manually derived size scores in the HWT-PT, and digitized letter-form scores and digitized measures of spacing between letters were highly correlated with manually derived letter-form scores and spacing scores in the MHA. Implications for the utility of the automated handwriting assessment tool in clinical and educational settings are discussed.