Too little, too much: A limited range of practice 'doses' is best for retaining grapho-motor skill in children

Long-term benefits after a rhyme-repetition based intervention program for kindergarteners: Better reading and spelling in the first grade.

“…In the kindergarten phase of the current study, we found no advantages, in terms of letter knowledge, for the children practicing nursery rhymes related to the alphabet over children practicing rhymes unrelated to the alphabet immediately after the intervention program (Eghbaria- Ghanamah et al, 2020), perhaps because the participating children, on the whole, had good baseline knowledge of letter names and were quite adept at letter identification. However, long-term benefits of practicing texts related to the alphabet can still be expected to occur when children attend first grade and start acquiring literacy skills.…”

“…Demographic details about the participating children were previously described (Eghbaria- Ghanamah et al, 2020) and are here presented in brief. All of the children were native speakers of Arabic, spoke the same local vernacular (SAV), and were recruited from six public kindergartens in the same geographical region with a middle-low socioeconomic background.…”

“…The motivation for comparing recitation to listening (i.e., oral language interventions) in terms of their ability to subsequently benefit reading and writing abilities, stems from studies that showed that oral language skills in preschoolers (including aspects such as syntactical and content knowledge, as well as receptive and expressive vocabulary), in nondiglossic situations, contribute to the children's reading achievements (e.g., Bishop & Adams, 1990;Brimo et al, 2017;Demont & Gombert, 1996;Dickinson et al, 2019;Storch & Whitehurst, 2002;Tunmer & Chapman, 2012a, 2012b. We have recently reported findings indicating that in the short term, kindergarteners who were engaged in the recitation of rhymes outperformed their peers who engaged in listening only, in their morpho-syntactical abilities as well as in tests of receptive and expressive vocabulary (Eghbaria- Ghanamah et al, 2020). Also, the ability to recall the rhymes used in the intervention program, verbatim as well as in content after a six-month interval, was superior in the reciting group compared to the listening group (Eghbaria-Ghanamah et al, 2021).…”

From Hand to Eye: a Meta-Analysis of the Benefit from Handwriting Training in Visual Graph Recognition

“…depends on how training is parsed across sessions. In a recent study on motor learning (where visual recognition was not tested), Ghanamah, Eghbaria-Ghanamah, Karni, and Adi-Japha (2020) showed that practice does not always makes perfect. Increasing training duration within a single session had immediate but transient benefits, quickly lost after training.…”

“…Both perceptual and sensorimotor learning involve a complex interplay between an online phase of (transient) improvement, corresponding to learning within-session, and a second phase, posttraining, reflecting memory processes and stabilization of cognitive representations underpinning long-term permanent effects (e.g., Ghanamah et al, 2020;Prettyman, 2019;Stickgold, James, & Hobson, 2000). Indeed, when viewing (real) letters, only fluent adult readers showed functional activation of a distributed network including parietal and frontal regions, whereas activation was restricted to the vOT in 8-year-olds, and it was only in 6-year-old beginning readers (who still did not know all letters of the alphabet) that functional activity at the bilateral temporal cortex was modulated by letter forms (handwritten vs. printed: Vinci-Booher & James, 2020).…”