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Putting actual pen to paper can have significant benefits for brain development, the Los Angeles Times reports. Recent research has found that when students learn how to write by hand, they also increase their brain activity and improve their fine motor skills. Similar benefits were not detected when kids were typing or simply repeating their lessons verbally.

Scientists compared the neuroimage scans of preschoolers who were learning to write by practicing printing their letters and those who were just doing verbal repetition.

After four weeks of training, the kids who practiced writing by hand showed brain activation similar to an adult's, said James, the study's lead researcher. The benefits of writing by hand also included improved letter recognition, which is the No. 1 predictor of reading ability at age 5.

Good handwriting also has benefits that are harder to detect on a brain scan. For most kids, writing is faster than typing. Research found that students between second and sixth grade wrote essays that were both longer and more thorough when using pen and paper rather than a computer. In addition, those who hand-wrote their papers did it quicker than those who typed them.

This research, however, is in contradiction with a Vanderbilt University study done in Spring 2011 that showed that students who typed produced better quality writing.

Although more and more school districts are dropping cursive requirements for their students, either because they lack the funds or because teaching keyboarding seems a more logical application of limited funds, there are others who believe development of good handwriting is an important part of education.

Colorado makes a compelling case-in-point. While the public schools in the state are moving away from cursive, usually devoting only a small part of class time to it up to third grade, private schools frequently make it a backbone of their literacy efforts. Some, like Denver Montclair International School, start teaching handwriting in kindergarten because they believe that in addition to other benefits, knowing cursive also helps their students learn second languages like French and Spanish.

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Research: Handwriting Helps Child Brain Development - Education News

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Putting actual pen to paper can have significant benefits for brain development, the Los Angeles Times reports. Recent research has found that when students learn how to write by hand, they also increase their brain activity and improve their fine motor skills. Similar benefits were not detected when kids were typing or simply repeating their lessons verbally.

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Remembering the orientation of newly learned characters depends on the associated writing knowledge: A comparison between handwriting and typing

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Recent data support the idea that movements play a crucial role in letter representation and suggest that handwriting knowledge contributes to visual recognition of letters. If so, using different motor activities while subjects are learning to write should affect their subsequent recognition performances.

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Even if computers will dot students' I's and cross their T's for much of their life, Indiana University research suggests teaching them handwriting skills is still important in helping them learn to read.

That notion runs counter to current national standards. Indiana joined 43 other states last year in adopting a set of national curriculum guidelines that emphasize teaching students keyboarding skills. They hardly mention teaching handwriting, much less cursive writing, as Hoosiers have learned.

IU psychology professor Karin James says that might be unwise. She conducted the research that found teaching young children to write letters activated parts of their young brains that become critical for reading.

"It might be fine [to give the option not to teach handwriting anymore], but we don't know that," James says. "And the research is pointing to that it might not be fine, you might be setting up a child's brain to interpret letters and words in a very different way."

James' experiment involved a group of a dozen four- and five-year olds. She scanned their brains, then split them into two groups - one was shown letters and instructed to recognize them visually, the other was taught to write letters. This training went on over four weeks.

"It sounds old-fashioned when you put forth the argument that you lose connection with the past. But then there's also that scientific aspect of it. We don't know what's going to happen later on if you don't teach children how to write on paper or how to write cursive."
-Kathleen Wright, textbook publisher

When she put the kids back into the brain scanner, the two groups showed very different results: The scans for the group that was simply shown letters didn't look that different. But in the scans for the group that learned to write the letters, James saw a huge spike in activity in their brains' reading network.

"It's not just that you're using your hands to create the letters, because typing seems to be different than handwriting," James says. "It's that you're actually creating those forms with your hands. That seems to be making a difference."

Literacy expert and Vanderbilt University education professor Steve Graham says the implications for James' work in an educational setting aren't clear. Handwriting is clearly important in education, Graham says, but typing should also be taught in the classrom.

"I'm not sure what it means that more parts of the brain light up when you do handwriting versus when you find with any other activity," Graham said. "It's not necessarily surprising that particular parts of the brain light up when you do certain kinds of activities. With something like typing, that's a simpler motor skill, so I'd expect less of the brain to light up."

Read our full Q&A with Graham here.

Last April, the Indiana Department of Education gave school districts the option to stop teaching cursive in schools beyond third grade because of the state's adoption of those national curriculum standards, known as the Common Core State Standards. The story made headlines across the country and even in some international newspapers.

But even though the Common Core emphasizes keyboarding, most agree it's not likely that districts will stop teaching handwriting altogether.

Kathleen Wright, national product manager for Ohio-based Zaner-Bloser Publishing, says overall sales for her company's handwriting texts haven't seen a dip. But schools are buying fewer texts for older grades.

"[Schools] aren't teaching it as far into the elementary years as they would before," Wright says. "Whereas people might buy their program K-5 before, now they buy it K-3.

"It sounds old-fashioned when you put forth the argument that you lose connection with the past," Wright says. "But then there's also that scientific aspect of it. We don't know what's going to happen later on if you don't teach children how to write on paper or how to write cursive."

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Why Schools Should Keep Teaching Handwriting, Even If Typing Is More Useful

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Even if computers will dot students' I's and cross their T's for much of their life, Indiana University research suggests teaching them handwriting skills is still important in helping them learn to read. That notion runs counter to current national standards.

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Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old's stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane's mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning.

She's right. Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old's stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane's mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning. She's right.

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SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

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Subscription and open access journals from SAGE Publishing, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children: A comparison between handwriting and typing

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Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives de la Méditerranée

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Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children: A comparison between handwriting and typing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A large body of data supports the view that movement plays a crucial role in letter representation and suggests that handwriting contributes to the visual recognition of letters. If so, changing the motor conditions while children are learning to write by using a method based on typing instead of handwriting should affect their subsequent letter recognition performances.