Influences of Handwriting Quality on Teacher Evaluation of Written Work

Abstract

Each of 45 teachers and 36 student teachers rated descriptive paragraphs varying in quality of content and quality of handwriting style. Multiple Classification Analysis indicated that neither the teacher characteristics of age, experience, level taught, and degrees held, nor the student teacher characteristic of level taught had a significant influence on the score given a paper. Analysis of variance indicated that the variation in scores explained by handwriting was significant. Papers with better handwriting consistently received higher scores than did those with poor handwriting regardless of quality of content.