An assessment tool for judging the overall appearance of Chinese handwriting based on opinions from occupational therapists

Children's handwriting performance is a part of concern by parents, teachers and researchers, because learning to write is a major and critical task for children. An assessment tool capable of evaluating students' handwriting automatically can help teachers to provide feedback to students and to find out more objectively the specific problems identified. In this paper, we propose an assessment tool for judging the overall appearance of the student's Chinese handwriting by finding different geometric transformed parameters of a Chinese character with respect to a template character. By cross-validation with a team of occupational therapists who are more experienced in assessment of handwriting performance, it is hoped that a more reliable handwriting evaluation is received. The proposed tool has been integrated into a web-based system for assisting children to write correctly and precisely. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.