Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated.

With primary history contributing to writing, some research by Sandra Dunsmuir and Peter Blatchford into pupils aged 4-7 has relevance to history teaching. The findings were published in the "British Journal of Educational Psychology", edition 74. Pupils' writing development was studied in their home and through pre-school to Key Stage 1. They discovered that handwriting fluency is vital to compositional fluency. The children's attitudes to writing are even more influential. They reinforced earlier evidence that providing regular writing opportunities which were not fragmentary and discontinuous was important, as well as teacher awareness of progression, a focus on the activity as well as its completion, strong encouragement and measuring attitudes was significant.