Exploring the effectiveness of a mobile writing application for supporting handwriting acquisition of students with dysgraphia


Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Eğitim Fakültesi, Bilgisayar ve Öğretim Teknolojileri Eğitimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2017

Öğrenci: SİNAN HOPCAN

Danışman: SANİYE TUĞBA TOKEL

Özet:

Handwriting is one of the most important and essential skills for both literacy and beyond. However, some students may have difficulty in writing. Dysgraphia, expressed as the disorder of written expression, is the state of writing skills being below the expected level of intelligence, age, and education of the student. The main purpose of the study is to examine the effectiveness of the mobile writing application for students with dysgraphia and to determine whether there is an improvement in writing skills of the students after using this application. A mixed method design was employed in this study. 11 students with dysgraphia were participated to the study. To sum up, the results of this study revealed: 1) Experts’ views before the quasiexperimental design were very positive. The aspects need to be improved were modified before the experiment. 2) The mobile writing application contributed to acquire writing skills (letter, spells, and words) for students with dysgraphia. 3) Students’ percentages of on-task durations were in a range of 80% and 100%. When the writing speed of students session by session were examined, there was an increase in all of them. The correct attempts of the students were increased session by session and the number of incorrect attempts decreased. The line violation of the students tended to decrease session by session. The frequency of the third-degree clue tends to decrease the session by session while the other clue types seem to be at the same level or tend to increase 4) Special education teachers’ views were positive about mobile writing application.