handwriting difficulties: introducing an instrument

objectives: the main purpose of this study is to produce an instrument for handwriting evaluation and to execute it on mentally retarded (mr) students. methods: this was a descriptive, cross-sectional, and relationship study. 126 mr students (53 girls and 73 boys) ranging from 9 to 19 years old (13.23±2.17) from two exceptional children schools in shahr-e-rey participated in this study. a handwriting checklist made by the researcher was executed on all students. data were analyzed by u-mann whitney, one-way anova, and spearman rank correlation. results: the test showed there isn’t a significant relationship between handwriting and laterality (p=0.196), sex (p=0.487) and age (p=0.449). there is a significant relationship between handwriting and grade (r=0.448, p<0.005), but no significant difference was seen between different grades. “separate writing” caused minimum legibility (81%), and “spacing” was damaged at the least (34.9%). discussion: the frequency of handwriting difficulties in mr students showed that the necessity of professional attention in exceptional schools.