Beyond Left and Right Handedness

lt;p> Prof. Dr. Elke Kraus holds a doctorate in occupational therapy (Ph.D) from the Department of Occupational Therapy at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She conducted several studies on handedness in children and developed an instrument, the "Handedness Profile", to understand swapping hand use. She also holds a Bachelor's degree in Occupational Therapy and a Diploma in Adult Education from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. In her clinical experience with children and her teaching career, she worked in South Africa, Australia and Germany. Since 2005 she is Professor for Occupational Therapy at the Alice-Salomon University in Berlin and heads the Department for Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy. She directs numerous research projects and authors many publications and on the Editorial Board of the German peer-reviewed Journal "ergoscience". In addition to the "Handedness Profile", a standardized and normed assessment to determine the extent of left- or right-handedness in children, she also developed several other instruments, including the Pediatric Occupational Therapy Assessment and Process Instrument ("Pädiatrisches Ergotherapeutisches Assessment und Prozessinstrument - PEAP"), an occupation-centered for assessing the occupational status in children aged 3-8 years; and two screening and intervention tools targeting finemotor and handwriting skills "Treffpunkt" and the "Schreib-Mal-Schule".

1 Introduction.- 2 Basics of handedness.- 3 Determining handedness.- 4 Possible causes of changing hand use.- 5 The development of the handedness profile.- 6 The current handedness profile.- 7 Proposal of a differentiation system "handedness type with variants" for the analysis of changing hand use.- 8 Ideas for intervention with handicapped children.- 9 Case studies from the field.- 10 A panorama: implication for practice, theory, and research.

"Kraus provides a comprehensive and scholarly discussion, offering in-depth insights into all facets of handedness ... . the book can be useful for readers who are just beginning their exploration of handedness. In the field of handedness, theory and research were standing a bridge too far from practice; and for too long. Elke Kraus's book is finally building this conceptual bridge. May the reader walk over it, as I have, and enjoy the beautiful new landscape below it." (Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, Laterality, February 14, 2024)