The handwriting of children with spina bifida.

As part of the Greater London Council (GLC) Spina Bifida Survey the handwriting of 131 11-year-olds with spina bifida and 56 controls was examined. The children copied the sentence "The dog sits in his box" in the course of an extensive battery of intelligence and attainment tests. Writing speed formed one scoring dimension and nine further categories were devised in collaboration with a handwriting consultant. All but one of these ten dimensions consistently discriminated between the spina bifida children and the controls, and between the spina bifida children divided according to such variables as IQ, school type, degree of disability, reading scores and presence or absence of a valve. In every case the differences were in the predicted direction, with the handwriting scores of the brighter, less damaged children, and those attending ordinary schools being higher. These findings are consistent with those obtained by other researchers and reflect an educational disadvantage in that the children with spina bifida had handwriting which was slow, with the letters being poorly formed and the words poorly spaced.