Handwriting speed in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder: are they really slower?
Kids with DCD aren’t slow writers—they’re frequent pausers; target cognitive planning, not motor speed.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched kids write with a special pen that records every dot and pause.
They compared children with Developmental Coordination Disorder to same-age peers.
The task: copy a short story for two minutes while the computer tracked speed and stops.
What they found
Kids with DCD wrote less total text, but their pen moved at normal speed.
The difference came from more and longer pauses, not slow strokes.
Extra stops suggest trouble planning the next letter or word.
How this fits with other research
Lam et al. (2011) saw the opposite in dyslexia: those kids really did move the pen slower.
The two studies look alike—copy task, stopwatch, kids with a diagnosis—but the bottleneck differs.
Koegel et al. (2014) add a fix: give live visual feedback and pauses drop a bit, lifting legibility.
Cheng et al. (2022) review shows ADHD writers also stall at planning; DCD now joins that club.
Why it matters
Stop drilling faster strokes. Instead, teach quick planning routines—verbal cues, dot-to-dot starts, or 3-second think time before each word. These tweaks cost nothing and may save minutes of pause.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Handwriting difficulties are often included in descriptions of Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). They are cited as the most common reason for referral to health professionals following parent and teacher concerns about slow and untidy writing. The aim of this study was to compare handwriting performance in English children with and without DCD across a range of writing tasks, to gain a better understanding of the nature of 'slowness' so commonly reported. Twenty-eight 8-14 year-old children with a diagnosis of DCD participated in the study, with 28 typically developing age and gender matched controls. Participants completed the four handwriting tasks from the Detailed Assessment of Speed of Handwriting (DASH) and wrote their own name; all on a digitising writing tablet. The number of words written, speed of pen movements and the time spent pausing during the tasks were calculated. The findings confirmed what many professionals report, that children with DCD produce less text than their peers. However, this was not due to slow movement execution, but rather a higher percentage of time spent pausing. Discussion centres on the understanding of the pausing phenomenon in children with DCD and areas for further research.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.06.005