Handwriting and the 21st Century: What is the Future?
The one-day conference, held on National Handwriting Day(!) was co-sponsored by Zaner-Bloser, the leading publisher of handwriting instructional materials, and the American Association of School Administrators (AASA). Approximately 400 registrants attended, mainly consisting of teachers and school administrators.
The event arose from the need to examine the role of teaching “hand-generated communication---handwriting, keyboarding, and other digital communication”---in the 21st century.
The current situation: Schools across the nation seem to be de-emphasizing handwriting, especially cursive writing from their daily curriculum. The new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts DO NOT include hand-generated communication skills. Instead, it is left up to each state to decide if it wants to include them. Some educators are opting to teach only manuscript and keyboarding; some a combination of manuscript, cursive, and keyboarding; and some just keyboarding.
What the experts had to say: The presenters included academicians in the fields of psychology, occupational therapy, education, and neuroscience. In general, the results of their research seem to support the conclusion that there is a neural correlation between the motor skill of handwriting and a positive effect on reading acquisition and creative writing. In other words, handwriting helps the learner to read and write.
Two of the presenters made a particularly strong case for handwriting:
Dr. Virginia W. Berninger, University of Washington, Department of Educational Psychology, is considered the guru of handwriting skills research. She has worked in this area for more than two decades. She reported that “considerable research shows that both handwriting and spelling support the written expression of ideas”. She cited some very technical evidence to support her conclusion.
Dr. Karin Harman James, Indiana University, Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, is one of a handful of researchers worldwide that probes the brain function of five-year-old children using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). The results of her research demonstrated that 1.) there is a distinct system in the human brain that is recruited during reading that is also recruited during writing.; 2.) that the reading network develops as a function of handwriting experience; and 3.) that handwriting and not keyboarding, leads to adult-like neural processing in the visual system of the preschool child. These findings suggest that self-generated action, in the form of handwriting, is a crucial component in setting up brain systems for reading acquisitions.
So, my take-away from the conference is that keyboarding is an essential skill that all students will have to master in the 21st century world, but continuing to teach handwriting has enormous benefits to the young learner and should be kept. At the end of the conference we voted our own conclusions. The majority of us felt that yes, handwriting should still be taught; cursive should also be taught; and keyboarding, of course, should be taught and then let the students themselves decide later which method they prefer.
To end on a personal note: When I was in fourth grade, when spelling words were getting a little more difficult, my teacher told us that if we would write down each word twenty times, we would “own” that word. She was right. After studying educational psychology in college, I then understood the power of visual and kinetic memory.
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