Individual differences in motor learning in children

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Interdisciplinary Centers, Units and Projects::Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF)::Fall Research Expo
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Psychology
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Learning
Motor Skills
Handwriting
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author or copyright holder retaining all copyrights in the submitted work
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2025-10-03
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Ugbana, Sara
Mackey, Allyson
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Abstract

Brain plasticity changes over development, but it is unclear how it affects learning abilities in early years. Learning motor skills plays an important role in our lives relating to the development of skills such as writing, operating machines, and various coordinated body movements. Therefore, we sought out to see if there was an association between age and pace of learning handwriting motor skills in children. Over 6 to 8 lessons, 17 participants from about 6 to 8 years old completed a handwriting packet in which they traced unfamiliar Greek letters with their right and left hands. Each day consisted of a page with untimed practice sections for 2 Greek letters, and a final timed line of the first letter. We looked at their slope of learning over the lessons, examining if the pace in which they improved over the days correlated with their age. In this study, the association between age and pace of learning is practically nonexistent, with R scores at -0.13 for the dominant hand, -0.05 for the non-dominant hand, and -0.06 for the difference between the dominant and non-dominant hand. These findings indicate no significant change in the ability to learn writing motor skills between the ages of about 6 to 8 years of age. That is, 6 to 8 year olds learn writing skills at about the same rate; there was no shown improvement or degradation of their learning pace. Future studies may wish to look at a larger sample size and administer the packet in a more controlled and less distracting environment for the participant.

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2025-09-15
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This project was funded through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring (PURM) program.
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