Pencil grasp

PURPOSE: This article describes our clinical experience with a new needle driver (Olympus, Tokyo, Japan), which we have produced to facilitate minithoracotomy or port-access coronary artery anastomosis with the running suture technique. METHODS: The needle driver is 21 cm long, weighs 38 g, and has a grip shaft 1.4 cm in diameter. The device is held like a pencil. A side lever and a revolving disk in the shaft are manipulated with the fingers; a fine needle with a 7-0/8-0 monofilament suture can be grasped/released and driven to penetrate the coronary arterial wall...

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this research was to study how the speed and legibility of fourth-graders handwriting was affected by type of pencil grip on the Evaluation Tool of Children's Handwriting-Cursive. METHOD: Ninety-five typically developing students and 6 students receiving special education services completed the Evaluation Tool of Children's Handwriting-Cursive (ETCH-C). Photographs were taken of their pencil grips while they wrote the alphabet. One-way ANOVAs were calculated to compare legibility rates and writing speeds by type of pencil grip...

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine whether writing tool type and angle of writing surface affect grasp. METHOD: Fifty-one children 23 to 24 months of age who were typically developing drew with a primary marker, colored pencil, and small piece of crayon on a table and an easel. The marker and pencil were presented pointing left, right, and toward the child. The order of writing tool presentation was counterbalanced. Grasps were scored with a 5-point rating system and analyzed with dependent t tests...

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the influence ofpencil grasp on handwriting legibility during both short and long writing tasks in 46fourth-grade students who were typically developing. Matched samples were used to controlfor variability. METHOD: Regular classroom writing assignments were scoredfor word and letter legibility, and scores were compared using a mixed repeated-measures analysis of variance design. The two independent variables were pencil grasp (dynamic tripod grasp vs...

In a standard deceptive box procedure, children aged around 3 years typically fail to acknowledge their own prior false beliefs. For example, they judge incorrectly that they had initially thought a Smarties tube contained pencils after discovering these to be the actual content. Wimmer and Hart (1991) showed that children were more likely to answer correctly in a variant of this task known as a "state change", procedure. In this task, they saw that a container held its expected content (so the initial belief was true) before this was exchanged for something atypical...

Performance tests of young children in the age range 18 months to 4 1/2 years have been studied in a sample of 425 children living in an inner city area and a rural market town. Our results show that there is a minimum number of cubes built into a tower related to age which may indicate developmental delay. There is a developmental sequence of pencil grasp, and useful development scales in copying cube models, drawing geometric shapes, and the draw-a-man test. Girls are significantly ahead of boys in drawing skills...

Three groups of nondysfunctional adults were observed for atypical pencil grasps (i.e., nondynamic tripod grasps) used during functional writing situations: 58 occupational therapy students signing out equipment, 314 voters signing for their ballots, and 113 medical students taking a written examination. Among the total right-handed population, the most frequently used grasp was the dynamic tripod grasp (86%). The second most frequently used grasp was the lateral tripod grasp (10%). Other grasps were observed less often (less than 2% of the time)...

This paper describes a hand test consisting of three steps to test the subject's ability to grasp firmly another person's hand to hold a pencil firmly with fingers II-V with straight knuckles and maximally flexed finger joints, while the investigator pulls the pencil to hold on to a piece of paper with a rounded pinch grip between thumb and index finger while the investigator pulls the paper with a rounded pinch grip with submaximal strength. All three steps must be performed with each hand without causing pain...