Fine motor skills are key in preschool education. These skills refer to those that require the movement of little muscles in hands, such as picking up pieces with tweezers or handwriting. Recent evidence has shown that those children with an appropriate fine motor skills development in the early childhood are expected to obtain a better academic achievement during the first years of primary education than those with delays or impairments in their fine motor skills. Thus, this chapter provides with an overview of the literature on this area, based on the most recent reviews, with a special focus on the graphomotor skills (i.e., handwriting) in the association between fine motor skills and academic achievement. Furthermore, the latest proposals aimed to improve fine motor skills and graphomotor skills are reviewed and assessed according to certain aspects which are considered relevant in the literature. Some guidelines for practitioners may be extracted.
TopFine Motor Skills As Predictors Of Academic Achievement
It has been found that pre-school children spend between thirty and sixty percent of their day participating in motor activities, eighty-five percent of them being fine motor tasks involving pencil and paper (McHale & Cermak, 1992). A later study (Marr et al., 2003) revealed that at this educational stage an average of forty six percent of the day is spent participating in fine motor activities, almost half the time consisting in activities involving paper and pencil. These data show the evidence that students at this educational stage participate in various fine motor tasks which occupy a large part of the time at school.
Fine motor skills (FMS) are defined as the movements of small muscles, fundamentally involving fingers, and that require eye-hand coordination (Dinehart & Manfra, 2013; Luo et al., 2007). Research on FMS has historically used numerous terms, such as eye-hand coordination or visual motor integration, which according to Strooband et al. (2020) could be organised into three groups: FMS, including fine motor integration, accuracy or speed; visual motor ability, which includes visual perception or visual motor integration; and finally, the group consisting of manual skills, perceptual motor skills and graphomotor skills.
Numerous research works indicate that FMS are significant predictors of later academic achievement (Bart et al., 2007; Dinehart & Manfra, 2013; Fischer et al., 2020). In classrooms, many of the tasks used to check students' performance, including the activities that are part of the marks, rely heavily on FMS (Dinehart & Manfra, 2013).
Research has suggested different explanations to this association between FMS and academic achievement. In this sense, the study by Grissmer et al. (2010) is of great importance since it presents the idea that the relationship between FMS and academic performance could be the result of associations with more complex cognitive and behavioural elements. Thus, considering the most recent works hitherto on neuroimaging and neuroanatomy linking motor development and cognition and the suggestions of these authors, it could be said that “rather than a simple correlation of skills, current evidence suggests that the fine motor / academic performance association is a complex, brain-based phenomenon” (Dinehart & Manfra, 2013, p. 139). However, research has advanced and nowadays other ideas have been presented, such as the “Cognitive Load Theory” or the one that suggests the use of common neural networks for motor and cognitive tasks, as presented in the third point of this chapter.
From a practical point of view, when we talk about FMS we might refer to different tasks such as untying shoelaces, putting a coin in a money box or putting a nail into a hole. We are referring to activities that require precision and finger dexterity. Among them, hand dexterity could be defined as the “coordination and manipulation of objects in a timely manner” (Wang et al., 2011, cited by Strooband et al., 2020). Other FMS, particularly those that involve writing, that is, graphomotor skills, are considered significantly more complex (Dinehart & Manfra, 2013).
Object manipulation skills are essential for the appropriate use of strength and control of the arm, hand, and fingers for writing, but graphomotor activities are considered the joint result of several cognitive and neuromotor processes (eg, visuospatial perception, visual size distribution, visual recovery and orientation), so it follows that handwriting and manipulation are different processes (Dinehart & Manfra, 2013). In this sense, the ability of preschoolers to copy different basic designs may be a stronger predictor of academic achievement in the last years of Primary Education and the first years of Secondary Education, than other types of fine motor tasks (Grissmer et al., 2010). Additionally, evidence was also found showing how certain FMS during preschool, such as inserting coins in a slot, threading beads or solving mazes tracing a line between two parallel lines, are associated with reading performance in the first year of Primary Education, considering that graphomotor skills and manual writing skills do not influence this association (Suggate et al., 2019).