Effectiveness of the Occupational Therapy Handwriting Intervention Guideline on Children

Difficulty Writing

handwriting, intervention, effectiveness, children, study protocol, clustered randomized controlled trial

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the Occupational Therapy Handwriting Interventions Guidelines (OTHIG) in enhancing handwriting performance among children. Method: Forty-two children recruited from private centers with occupational therapy indications and with handwriting issues, aged five to nine years, will be assigned to the experimental and control groups. Participants will receive a total of 10-week sessions, including training, intervention, and outcome measures. The experimental group will receive the developed OTHIG during handwriting skills intervention. Meanwhile, the control group will receive conventional interventions which not exposed to the OTHIG. This study is expected to provide evidence for the effectiveness of using the developed OTHIG to OTs in delivering their services, targeting children struggling with handwriting skills.

The study is a Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial (C-RCT) that systematically clusters the centers into the treatment and control groups. A total of 10 centers will be involved in this study. The clustering of all ten centers will allocate randomly into the treatment and control groups based on submitting the consent letter to the researcher and after an assessment of TPT and TVPS-4 are conducted. Ten early interventions have similar characteristics such as (1) hiring graduated occupational therapists from recognized universities in Malaysia, (2) having occupational therapists working daily at the centre, (3) having children aged five to nine years who receive OTs intervention. This randomization will be allocated based on the list of the centers that give an early submission of a signed consent form. The randomization will be carried out with a mechanism that neither the researcher nor children or center owners will know which group of intervention they will be assigned.

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Malaysia