Children in their first year at primary school who do not worry about how they write characters produce work of a much higher quality than those who pay care and attention to them, a report on Australian tests revealed this week.
'There was a dramatic difference between the two classes and it continued into their second year at [primary] school,' Carol Christensen, a cognitive psychologist and senior lecturer in education at University of Queensland, said.
She used sport an example to highlight the difference. Just as Rafael Nadal did not have to think about how he held the tennis racquet when playing Roger Federer at Wimbledon, so children would do better if they did not have to focus on how to hold a pencil or work out in their head what seven times eight was.
'It's called automaticity. Which is the ability to do a task quickly, accurately and effortlessly, and it underpins all the skills that enable us to do things without thinking about them.'
This, she said, was the basis of the relationship between low-level skills such as handwriting and the higher-order skills of creativity in the written language.
'If a teacher doesn't pay any attention to the quality of handwriting, it frees the child to think about the ideas they are going to write about.'