Does Hand Size Affect
Handwriting Size?
Charlotte Guest & Avani Jagavkar
Year 8, SCEGGS Darlinghurst, NSW
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.
Method
To test our hypothesis we provided 50 students with a
survey. On this sheet there were 4 steps for the students to
complete:
1. Name
2. Age at the end of the year
3. Size of hand
4. To write ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ in
the space provided
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.
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
Results
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
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.