1. Does Hand Size Affect Handwriting Size?
Charlotte Guest & Avani Jagavkar
Year 8, SCEGGS Darlinghurst, NSW

2. Aim and Hypothesis
AIM: To determine whether the size of Year 8 girls’ hands affect the size of their writing. HYPOTHESIS: The size of the student’s hand will affect the size of their handwriting. Students with bigger hands will have smaller writing.

3. Method
To test our hypothesis we provided 50 students with a survey. On this sheet there were 4 steps for the students to complete:
Name
Age at the end of the year
Size of hand
To write ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ in the space provided

4. Method
When measuring the size of the student’s hand we provided them with the picture below. This helped to keep the hand measurements consistent and stop any inaccurate measurements.

5. Method
When measuring the average perpendicular height of the lower-case letters in students’ handwriting we followed the steps below:
Exclude capital letters
Exclude stems and tails on the letters: q, t, y, p, d, f, g, h, j, k, and b
Exclude all ‘L's

6. Results

7. Discussion Improvements:
Although this was a valid experiment, as the variables were controlled, there are some improvements that could have been made to make the test more accurate:
We could have measured the hand size in millimetres to make the measurements more accurate
We could have surveyed more people so that the trends were more visible and our findings more reliable

8. Conclusion
In conclusion there was no relationship between hand size and handwriting size. Furthermore, we found that the smallest hand size and the largest hand size had the same handwriting size which was 3mm. This was the most common handwriting size among the sample of girls measured. The average hand size was 16.7cm and the average handwriting size was 3mm.